


LEVIATHAN

by elektra



Series: balance of power [2]
Category: Bleach
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood and Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Non-Explicit Sexual Content, Nonbinary Ulquiorra, Other, Realpolitik
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-12-23
Packaged: 2018-10-18 14:33:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 46,828
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10618920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elektra/pseuds/elektra
Summary: "To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.”Breathe. Ulquiorra must remember to do it, remember how it is to function anew.





	1. PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF

**Author's Note:**

> this work was created as an addendum to my other one, ‘for you are dust’. it cannibalized that one in order to tell the story i was actually interested in and put more thought into.
> 
> if minor facts/details are wrong, i haven’t read bleach since 1842.
> 
> anyways. here goes nothing. mind the tags.

Ulquiorra rematerializes into a fraction of their usual form with a violent smack onto the flat, round roof of a crumbled tower in a flurry of sand-coated feathers.

The suddenness of the moment has their lungs burning, both from the effort of encouraging rapid regrowth – and the fact that their blood has smeared profusely beneath them and is currently bubbling out faster than the stone could absorb each pulse from their open ended arteries.

It’s true, that their body is a weapon; it doesn’t know what to replace first, the blood to replenish their tissues, or the larger pieces that have been gouged out of them. Immediately, from the pain (which is an odd sensation, unfamiliar and stinging without mercy), they can sense an absent left leg, and its corresponding arm nothing more than a bone with scrappy muscles being slowly, slowly woven back together. A deep hole in their abdomen, but not as alarming as it had once been, when their torso had been detached from their hips altogether. Blood has already begun to crust uncomfortably at their hairline, becoming mixed with sweat and drying into crackled layers just as quickly.

Astride the slickness of their own gore, Ulquiorra slides helplessly off the slab with a soft groan, their slight weight now even less with missing parts. Debris lodges against their spine, but the discomfort is greatly outweighed. They’re uncomfortably reclined against the side of the fallen building, but… alive.

Somehow. 

They had doubted the escape would come to any fruition – and perhaps it has not. They’ve failed, regardless of any innovations. Does it matter? There is no one left to give them any laurels for a job done half well. Their head lolls to the side, cheek dented by their shoulder.

A long cast down their own body once more, inspecting the damage with their foggy, closing vision.

Oh. 

Some of fingers are missing off their remaining right hand. What’s more is that the sparse digits are still claws, but one has snapped peculiarly backwards at the middle knuckle, perhaps in their slide downwards, and now flops listlessly by a precious few threads of nerves and muscle fibres. The hand is a dark, patchy hue matted with feathers, the wayward likes of which hang from their tattered clothing, and from that is only left a streak of white fabric shrouding them neck to thigh. 

A war dog that’s been chained to this city and left to bleed out.

It’s what they deserve.

Ulquiorra utters a wet noise that catches on blood dribbling from their nostrils, a noise which may have been a sigh in any other circumstance. It burns their lungs, expands their ribs uncomfortably against the textured edge of a rock. The pain, then, does not fade, but their mind does. It is difficult to keep their eyes open. Their sclera are parched, but prickle with effort and misshapen eyelashes that poke and prod beneath their eyelids.

They close their eyes.

Instinctually, it is something unheard of.

Reasonably, Ulquiorra would not be able to save themself in any capacity should some starved arrancar find this easy victory gloat.

 

 

* * *

 

 

And thus, when they wake again, it is a tempting lick of surprise that there is no such base animal chewing on the end of their malformed arm. 

It must have only been for a short while, their lapse in consciousness, judging by their yet still mangled state. Their tongue pushes around a lump of dust that gathered underneath it. The arm that had been shorn off was mostly reformed while they slept, only stitching itself back in select patches around the elbow, wrist, and tricep. The leg comes along at dragging speeds, but they’ve nowhere else to be. In Ulquiorra’s midsection is still a vicious wound; dark, foreboding, gelatinous. Whatever priority their architecture is given in restoring itself, it seems an exposed intestine, glinting between their fingers, is not at the top of such list. 

So be it.

What is eternally more alarming then is that parts of Ulquiorra which had remained:

Murciélago.

Their right hand has recovered, finger joints snapped back into place and set into sockets correctly again, but still dread claws rather than true fingers, and still dark talons extending from the second knuckle. Clumps of feathers adorn the hinge of their wrist, and moult stubbornly up to their elbow, where the discoloured skin fades black to white and melds into their normal musculature.

Grotesque.

Instead of dwelling on the image of their failure, Ulquiorra focuses the scant amount of energy they’ve left into standing. For what purpose, they aren’t sure, but it’s something to be done, whether it be now or later.

It isn’t the most challenging of tasks against the greatest hurdle of living itself. Their blood has created an uneven, blotchy texture on the stone around them, their nails finding something within it to cling onto, at least to drag a forearm and then elbow onto it. The fresh skin of their reforming foot is scuffed in the scrabble, tiny capillaries bursting open to create new veins beneath them, but that leg is the least of their concern. A limb, what’s a limb, but the heavy weight of their entrails feel ready to slosh out of their torso should they lean too far forward on the crumbled tower, this is the problem.

Breathe. Ulquiorra must remember to do it, remember how it is to function anew. Breathing is something they must do — collecting particles of souls that breeze through Las Noches. 

Except, that isn’t quite right, in the closed environment beneath the dome. From where their head has fallen between their shoulders, they look up, and see what has been done to it. What _they_ have done to it: the patchwork atmosphere that flickers between sunlight and starless dark. Right. They had broken through it in hopes that there would be reason to mend it, that someone would be left with the ability to praise their valour at any cost, and then the ability to fix it. This city had been left in their custody, with the thought that it would still be a city in the end.

Szayel Aporro could fix the dome. But, lily-livered rat he is, Ulquiorra cannot place his presence in any immediate vicinity. At any rate, there would be no point. It would be as useful as cloth bandaging a leak.

The sky is in a silent pry away from itself, grand chunks of it falling into seas of sand. In the distance in every direction remain some glimmers, the uneven edges like glass shards tipped gangrenous with Ulquiorra’s fading reiatsu.

They’ve always excelled at breaking things after all; little tools on a metal tray they could not bother to handle with care, little specimen bones they were instructed not to tamper with, the little hearts of naïve little boys and girls.

Bandages — the thought returns with that of Szayel and the gush of wetness from their stomach. With one arm poised and tight-muscled on the shoulder height debris, they hunch over to inspect the wound. While their body attempts to recover deeper, more internal damage, the most outer skin around the edges has torn open all over again. 

Ulquiorra has only ever seen the rolls of white fabric in Szayel’s drawers. He, too, was more of a destroyer than a healer. Though, Yammy, once, had visited their tower while the great mass of his shoulder had been recovering, wrapped and tied neatly. At the very least, it would keep their organs in place.

The laboratory would not be very far, for one with a disposition decidedly more lively than Ulquiorra’s.

In this reprieve, their bared foot has fully healed and their skin hardened. Szayel has a vast closet of clothing, but how much of it would fit and how much of his laboratory has been potentially ruined are two different matters.

Yet, what else are they to do? What other fate would happen upon them if not one of trial and likely error? The meek would tell them to merely crawl into the dirt and weep until better fortune somehow arises. 

There is only one more thing barring their journey: how many Shinigami may still be lurking the city, and how many were alive to be curious about a being materializing out of a cloud of ash. At least Ichigo was under the impression they were dead. It may be enough.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The above ground structure of Szayel’s laboratory has been completely destroyed. It is a wretchedly loud wail they imagine him giving at the sight of it, all rubble and useless dust smeared on shattered gold tiles and the stone foundation. In some places, however, the ruination is so deep that it pierces into the underground levels of his tower, and the nearest such gap is not overly obstructed. Kicking away a few small slabs makes a means to squeeze through, and down into the next floor.

There had been no issue in the trip here: they had landed not too far from the tower and any footprints in the sand had already been swept away. No notable corpses had lined their path. In fact, the city has been dipped into a sinister quiet. It will likely matter little or attract any wandering spirits should they make a little commotion.

And so Ulquiorra begins by delicately placing their feet in select places along the spillage of the stone wreckage into the breach, clambering down this way for a few inches at a time. The descent is easy, until they discover that they’ve overestimated the simplicity of the way the floor had broken, and they can find nothing to scrabble onto with their toes other than a smooth, long section of ceiling. Ungainly, they fall the last few metres, landing on their side and shoulder with a heavy, dust stirring thump and crack. It is not the most pleasant nor graceful of drops, a minor blossom of pain shooting and quelling just as quickly from elbow to neck, but they are there now. 

The lights have all gone. Whatever source had once been keeping the room lit was no longer — a generator destroyed on the top floor or the very presence of Aizen, they did not know. The hole they’d entered through, and many others like it dotted around the ceiling, allow for small slats and trickles of light. Regardless, when they stand from the floor to look at which room they’d stumbled upon, it is Szayel’s bedroom, and they need no vision besides their own to know it.

They’ve spent an inordinate amount of time here.

Kurosaki Ichigo — he may have wept for a lover’s defaced home, their presumed death, as his had also been wept for. What point, what purpose there would be to the perpetuated hopelessness of a situation, a mystery.

But Ulquiorra is not a wallower. They are not a sentimentalist. They do not care what has become of Szayel or his laboratory past the two’s usefulness to them. Most of all, they are not human in the same concentration Ichigo is (or even, in the right doses, Szayel) — their similarity ends in the layout of their veins. 

What is important is their sustained blood loss from those very veins.

The loss is not the most alarming part. They are remaking more blood as fast as they are getting rid of it, a cycle they have no trouble with maintaining, but the cause-effect injury is not one that they want to entertain for much longer. They don’t know what is lurking past these walls, or even in the next room over.

Ulquiorra is hyperaware of each speck of dust and grain of sand that settles in their abraded skin. It might risk infection if Las Noches was not as sterile an environment as it was. Might, anyways. Szayel was always speaking of viruses, blood, bodily fluid; his aversion to all of it except between his hands and three pairs of rubbery black gloves, but they hardly understood it with any meaningful depth.

They glance over more of the room. The only exit is off to the right, connecting to a seemingly dead end hallway that boasts a hidden door to a ledge over an empty hall. There are many such doors littered across the circumference of the space, but only one leading anywhere. To access the laboratory, however, is to descend that ledge and uncover another door — a privilege only Szayel has, in all his uniqueness. 

“ _Don’t have a bright idea and cut off my hand_ ,” he’d once muttered sullenly as they’d watched him place his palm on a small monitor.

Hm. Perhaps they should have after all.

No matter. A wall is a wall. They’ve battled more strenuous things.

More relevant of an issue: the bed. Ulquiorra sits on it, their breath sharp with the rearranging of their midsection. The sheets crumple only slightly under their meagre weight, just recently pressed and smoothed over the corners as Szayel did. They never saw the point: he would drag Ulquiorra back under as soon as a few hours later and have to do it all over again until the next time.

They rip the white sheet length wise, try it around their waist, and create another strip.

Szayel and Ulquiorra fucked. As easy and as harsh as pulling a stitch through skin. It was the truth. There was nothing past that; a hobby, something to be done in the lulls between meetings and tasks and Vasto Lorde hunts. He flutters his curly eyelashes and they let him do what he likes. 

Measure, rip, rip, rip, measure. An lighter task with the claws on their right hand.

It was a working arrangement. It was all he was good for, in the end. Szayel was a body to sap warmth from. He filled the spaces in silence with his honeyed voice and knew how to put his mouth to humbler uses when necessary — more than what could be said about many other desert residents. But he was also weak, disposable, and inconsequential. When Ulquiorra was finished taking what they needed from his tower, he would not be remembered.

This is what all his talk had given him.

The sheet is half destroyed when they deem it enough. They peel away the rag they’d been wearing and it goes with a slick, wet sound, wayward threads sliding through the mess of their gut. Sitting on the edge of the bed, they begin layering each ribbon in a tight makeshift bandage until the last, thickest piece holds it together with a tie. It is a little stiff. A little constricting. Better than leaving intestine trails smeared across Las Noches, a map of their wandering. 

Ulquiorra’s posture is straighter from the dressing’s press around their midsection when they stand again. Not a meek one to begin with, only lazily arrogant. The discs in their spine shift in the few steps to Szayel’s closet, like tectonic plates beneath a rippling skin. Hurtling oneself from the sky will have its consequences.

Inside the closet is a neat collection of Szayel’s clothing. A few spare laboratory coats, some more permanently stained than others. A pair of his boots on the floor lay toppled over, gloves carelessly thrown on top. Some robes, all far too big. But at the very end of the closet, there is a hanger with clothing in Ulquiorra’s size. Their standard pants and a pair of their own boots at the bottom of the closet, but instead a simple white high-collared shirt. There had been some similar clothing in their tower — pieces not from the uniforms, meant to be worn privately. They didn’t know he’d taken any of it from them.

The turtleneck goes on easy enough. They must sit on the bed again to slip carefully into their pants without disrupting the wound, but the pain has been quelled and replaced by the dull throb of compression. In the same position, they pull on their heeled boots, folding the excess fabric around their ankles inside.

And so: now what? 

The laboratory would reconnect Ulquiorra to a maze of tunnels and hallways, and so to the rest of Las Noches. What they would hope to accomplish in any other place they could do here, that is sit and decay, is something to be decided upon getting there.

Fine then.

They spare no last scour to the room before leaving. Snooping doesn’t interest them. Not here, at least. Any secrets that Szayel kept matter to or benefit them very little.

The hallway lights flicker on in response to their motion down it, turning off when they pass. But when they find the hidden door and exit onto the walkway around the atrium, the strips of light are already on. In patches — the ceiling has similarly caved in, allowing for some leakage of sun where the walls lay in piles.

The sensors had never been quite so sensitive…

Something scampers around the wreckage.

Ulquiorra flattens against the closed door. It is all they can do in this potentially vulnerable situation.

There is the sound of scrabbling against stone, the crumbling of it beneath a foot or hand. 

It is one of Szayel’s fracción. A short, round one who is attempting to climb up and out to the surface. The circumference of its body bounces uselessly with each grab at hairline cracks. 

_Szayel Aporro-sama! Szayel Aporro-sama!_ it cries.

This is not interesting to witness. It borders on pathetic — a character flaw of Szayel’s that he would not think so ahead to bestow the perfection on his life sources as well. By the time Ulquiorra moves again, the fracción is growing frustrated and desperate. 

The drop from the ledge to the floor of the theatre below is no less than forty feet, but they merely step off the edge, accepting the force of the fall into their bent knees. It rattles their skull and stirs a bit of dust, but that is all. The sleek green tiling below is dirty and now cracked into the shape of their boots.

It must be Lumina, at the other end of the grand hall. He cries and weeps and continues throwing himself at the stone. _Szayel Aporro-sama! Szayel Aporro-sama! Szayel Aporro-sama!_ until he becomes muffled, having rounded to the other side of the wreckage, and then he is silent. Ulquiorra does not care enough to investigate if he finally climbed out, or dashed himself bloody and dead.

They find the false wall covering a metal door easily, the frame cracked and unstable, but it slides apart with a small stutter to the left and right to reveal the biometric scanner. Certainly a problem. 

They take a step back — and kick the device.

A sharp lance of pain from pelvis to stomach.

Their wound dribbles out blood, staining the front of their clothing. But the scanner is now in several pieces on the floor, and any lock mechanism on the door able to be pried apart by their thin fingers. No loss to Szayel. They will never again be privy to his squawking reprimands.

A shame it had to be at the expense of their earlier work to keep themself in one general piece. Their hand touches the bloody spot, but it seems no more is leaking out, and progress down the opened hall. The mouth of it opens to the laboratory, no more doors or unique keys. Remarkably insecure, considering. Though, perhaps that is the point. Rummaging through the shelves will do nothing but create broken glass and larger distractions: the alchemist is turning hazard into gold beneath the trap door.

Ulquiorra spends a few minutes doing just that: rummaging.

The laboratory is built in a rotunda, just as the above-ground dome would suggest, open all the way around. Glass door cabinets and work tables cut the circle into different sections, stations Szayel Aporro would run his fracción between, only to receive incorrect equipment with a grandiose huff, and getting it himself despite the effort. He did this on purpose, of course, not having gotten his ego stroked by Ulquiorra’s hand as often as he would like.

In the centre of the laboratory is a core of machinery, screens, and inward-facing chairs. Ulquiorra absently runs one claw along a keyboard, _clack clack clack clack_ , as they round a section. 

Here, Szayel had once shown them the functions of a microscope.

_Everything is composed of smaller, unseen building blocks of the universe_ , he’d explained as he flicked on the light beneath the stage. Yes, it is not so difficult to understand or believe. He and Ulquiorra and their respective corpses were now the smaller pieces of a ladder meant for a god. No one could see them now.

_Clack clack clack clack_ , Ulquiorra continues along their path, their eyes darting left to right in search of something useful.

There, Szayel once sanitized a metal tray of metal tools, scrubbed with antiseptic soap up to the elbows.

_Clack clack —_ **_clunk._ **

Ulquiorra did not make that noise.

A breakneck reaction: they drop into a squat behind a chair that has already been swivelled out, evidently recently used. It does nothing to conceal them, and, belatedly they realize, would do little in terms of a shield should it shatter into their vulnerable torso. 

Silence. 

They hold their breath. 

If they have any more luck left, it will only be another fracción revelling in its despair. 

No more sound. They peek around the chair, their hand gripping its thin edge to keep it from spinning.

There is something wrong with their senses, their perception — they do not know if there’s anyone else of any noteworthy reiatsu around the bend. Hit their head too hard. Hit it a few more times, perhaps that’ll rattle things around, knock them back into order. 

Ulquiorra is about to stand again when there is some softer clanging from just around the corner. Minor shuffling, of some papers, thick manuscripts and manuals that have been left in neat piles. More movement. 

One of the documents falls on the floor with a muffled thud, and several loose sheets float away, some landing in front of them. A hand emerges. Then a shoulder, then a face, then the upper body of a Shinigami who is quickly gathering up what had fallen.

She looks up. She sees Ulquiorra. 

In the same moment it takes for her to recognize them and the danger, they have already pushed themself away from the chair, pivoted on one foot, and vanished behind a cabinet.

Shit.

Their ankle twinges, a bone deep soreness — the one they had reformed, the one they had just misaligned using their sonído. It sits at a strange angle, and the awkward balance they take on their other foot while still kneeling against the metal door of a nondescript cabinet has their midsection reopening. They can feel the skin peeling apart, the wetness of fresh blood and lymphatic fluid.

Ulquiorra doesn’t fear her. Not exactly. They fear their own fragility. They know they’re at a disadvantage, easy to rip apart into dissectible pieces.

“— Hello?” the Shinigami.

They lean their head back into the cabinet, move their weight on their foot, extend their injured leg. The ankle is healing, at least. The bones scrape together, the ligaments itch beneath their iron skin. 

“Hey! I know you’re there!”

And how. They don’t think so low of their enemies to forget about what is no longer in a field of vision, like a pack of rabid newborns.

“Okay — I’m — I don’t have a zanpakutō.” Something slides on the smooth floor. Her sword, in its sheath. “I just want to see you. If you come out, I won’t do anything. We’ll talk.”

Ulquiorra is not naïve enough to think that is her only weapon. But they would rather be attacked in the open laboratory than for her to grow tired of this and have them between a wall and the narrow space between the workbenches. They stand, and slink back out into the open, one hand on their oozing stomach. 

The Shinigami is small, but still taller than they are. She does not wear a badge or any other notable additions to her wardrobe besides a few pens tucked into a white overcoat, similar to the ones Szayel had worn while he worked. So she is of that sort. She must be looting his data. 

She is trembling in their presence. From fear, now that she has realized she’s thrown away her first means of protection, or from simply standing before them. A bit of both, if she was as smart as one was led to believe.

“What’s your name?” She swallows thickly around her own voice.

Ulquiorra’s eyes dart to the side, behind her, as far around in their own sockets as possible. No one else coming down the hall.

“I’m Iijima. I’m here with the Shinigami Research and Development Institute and if you would not mind, I’ll only take these documents and leave, you can continue doing whatever it is you’d like, whatever it is you were doing here,” Her arms are as leaves in the wind, her words nearly incomprehensible with how hastily she spits them out. The loose papers she had been picking up slip and slide in her wet grip. Her eyes are nearly melting out of her head at the very sight of them. “B—but I’ll need my zanpakutō.”

They follow her gaze down to their feet, where the toe of their boot touches the light grey scabbard she’d discarded. They kick it back to her, send it spinning.

They have no duty to kill her, nor to protect Szayel’s work.

As she bends down to take the sword, they see her other hand slip out of her lab coat’s pocket, clutching a compact communicator, thumb poised with intent over a key. 

Unfortunate. 

Her fingers touch the twine looped around the sheath. Ulquiorra closes the few steps of space in an instant, and her nose crunches obscenely against the hardest ridge of their knee. The back of her skull smashes into the sharp edge of the metal cabinet, denting and bloodying it, cracking little glass tubes against each other. Her light hair turns piecey and thick with brain matter. The communicator clatters out of her limp hand, a light on the corner of its screen flashing red.

They had no qualms with letting her live. How inauspicious for her that she tried to take advantage of that pacificity.

It doesn’t matter, at any rate. 

Footsteps come thundering down from where she’d been looting. From what Ulquiorra can recall, there was another door on that side of the laboratory. To where it leads besides an enemy’s hornet nest, they don’t know.

“Iijima! Iijima!” Four distinct voices. Four Shinigami storm the hall and appear around the corner, stopping to witness the scene of gore before them. Each is similarly dressed in a white overcoat. 

Ulquiorra raises their hand, poised to fire a bala and be done with this minor disturbance. 

The bala does not work. 

For a moment, they think Szayel’s reiatsu suppressors must still be in working order, until their disfigured right arm erupts in a pain worse than any tear to their intestinal wall. It feels as though their attack has been returned to them in double rather than simply being negated, and it travels up and down their bone in electric sparks that know not where else to go except bouncing back and forth. Beneath the mass of black feathers that quill out of their white skin, green fissures sparkle in glowing crackle patterns. 

They crumple to their knees. It is all they can do, when their strength has been sapped into this adverse reaction. Except, it does not fade. If anything, the intensity of the agony has multiplied, has left them heaving breath in and coming down to rest on their other elbow, a pulsating pang that gives no respite. 

The voices of the Shinigami are questioning, hesitant, from what Ulquiorra can tell. It is over the sound of static in between their ears, however, and the onslaught of sensation churns their stomach and flips their vision upside-down.

At this point, it may be easier for Ulquiorra’s consciousness to fade if the pain will not.

And so they fade, free-falling through reality.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Ulquiorra seems to find themself in this predicament more and more often: waking up, in pain, and discovering what new things ail them.

This time, they are not alone. Nor are they in possession of an autonomous body: their wrists are shackled at their sides, and their ankles likewise restrained. 

They’re in a laboratory. 

Not Szayel’s. They’ve been the observer of this scenario several times towards the end of his research before the war. Frantic gatherings of hollow and arrancar alike, experiments he slaved over for months and kept alive only just. Ulquiorra did not once think they would be on the other side of it — of anyone’s experiment.

The first indication that it is not Szayel’s laboratory is the smell. The stench, more like — decayed plastics, dusty, burnt out machinery and their churning noises. This room they are held in is lowly lit, so richly blue tinged that it would barely make a difference from no light at all. The only other illumination is that past a large glass window, where several screens have been left on. 

Lolling their head to one side, they can see a number of devices and monitors that are connected to their body. One is a pump which inflates and deflates as they breathe, another a vital monitor, one not in use with a bulky face mask attached, and another a clear fluid bag hanging from a stand. In their confusion, the variety of sounds made by each machine has grown quicker, in time with the blood rushing back into their head in a clarifying flood. _Drip drip drip_ , one goes. Another rattles. Another creaks, and another beeps rapidly. Little lines on the monitors spike up and down. 

When Ulquiorra turns their head to inspect the other side of the room, they are met with nothing but another pair of eyes.

Wide, gold eyes.

Szayel.

Their fists uncurl, not realizing how high their defences had been raised. The devices soothe themselves, for a moment, growing quieter.

Their question is not how it could be him, how he could be alive, but only why he’s elected to not loose their bonds any faster. 

But then their attention is drawn from those eyes, down to where a grin splits apart into equally yellow teeth, and the illusion is shattered.

It is not Szayel Aporro.

They are not in the presence of even a theoretical ally. 

Instead, Mayuri Kurotsuchi leans back to reveal his full figure. He wheezes out a laugh, and sucks loudly at those gold teeth. 

“That’s very interesting. Very, very interesting,” he creaks. His breath is as potent as the decay of his laboratory. Ulquiorra attempts to writhe out of their bindings, but succeed only in jamming their wrist into the metal shackle when he snaps, “Now, no need for any of that.” 

So Ulquiorra won’t be going anywhere anytime soon, until he’s done with them — at death or otherwise.

Mayuri shuffles around in silence for a few minutes. They turn their cheek onto the cold metal table they’ve been secured to, observing the machines more. They cannot discern much more of the functions than they already have. There is a smaller device connected to the wrist shackles they’d not noticed before, its design oddly familiar and out of place compared to the others.

He appears once more in their line of sight, resting his spindly fingers atop one machine that is beeping steadily, his grin not yet fallen.

“The electrocardiograph records the heart’s activity as represented by this line,” one lacquered nail tap-tap-taps the screen. “Yours plateaued when you first saw me. I wonder what it was you thought you saw. Or _who_.” He pauses, expectantly. Ulquiorra does not break their stare. “ _Tsk._ You can’t fool me. I’m fully aware that even an animal like you understands me.

What interests me more is how your body creates a pulse at all, considering your… _deficiency._ ” 

His tongue curls cruelly around every word, every hidden laugh in it. It seems a common element of the scientist.

Next, he rucks up their clothing to expose their stomach. The bandaging had, at some point, been removed, and now their abdominal muscles ripple at the very sight of them. Quite literally. The slow switch of muscle and flesh had progressed some, but in patches. Ulquiorra can only just lift their head to see, before Mayuri’s longest nail is prodding into the wound. 

They make no noise past the squelch of plasma and exudate.

“Very interesting…” he mutters again. The square corner of his nail nicks their susceptible intestine, catching a drop of blood, but the scratch is already healed by the time he can lean in to fully observe the process. Painful, barely. Uncomfortable, incredibly.

He repeats this motion several times, as though he can hardly believe their ability.

Without any more commentary, Mayuri cleans his hand on a dingy, once-white cloth and tinkers with various dials on the machines.

“This — I’m eager to see.” His hand hovers over a circular node before he turns it halfway to the right. The effect is instantaneous.

It’s the same as what happened in Szayel Aporro’s laboratory: an eruption of pain from Murciélago’s remnants, the reiatsu so powerful in the fractures along the blackened skin that it turns their marrow hot and molten. 

But this time, Ulquiorra is being fought by more than the constraints of their own body.

Each shackle feels as though it’s forcing the expulsion of reiatsu back into its source, as though every bond between every atom of their body is full beyond its limit. A taste of their own oppressive medicine, perhaps. 

Their wound is reopened, as well. At this point, it becomes too taxing and exhausting of a matter to continue brooding over, but the opposing, convulsive twists of their hips and abdomen do little but cruelly tear any healed skin apart.

It’s incredibly difficult to remain conscious. 

Ulquiorra cannot breathe, not with the effort of keeping themself in this state, however agonizing it is. Their mouth is open, but they are hardly able to continue their pained, squeaking gasps over the absolute torture of being forced to accept their own reiatsu being returned tenfold.

Then Mayuri turns the machine off.

The small of their back slams back into the metal table, sending it shrieking a few inches across the smooth floor. A thick layer of sweat has pooled at the base of their skull, itchy against their hairline. Their eyes feel like jelly, boiled in their own sockets. 

“Wonderful,” he hisses, pleased with himself. “The things true innovation can achieve. Granz’s generous donation will be much appreciated.”

The words are distant, hazy. Ulquiorra does not care, does not understand what had just been said. Some time later, an attendant comes to dress their wound. They’d hardly noticed that Mayuri had left at all. But they are left in the dark, blood-damp room soothed by nothing but the crackle of decrepit equipment for a very long while.

The ease with which Ulquiorra accepts their fate might be remarkable to some.

They could escape. They could truly fight for their right to life and the boundless desert. They’re very good at doing difficult things, after all.

And for what would they do all those things? To return to a fortress that they failed to defend as per their promise? To the decimated plane of their shortcomings? They have no sentimentality for Las Noches beyond taking it under their wing as a duty, the Espada with no inherent value to them besides a means to a pitiful end. 

At any rate, this predicament intrigues them. That is reason enough to continue along this path, if only to see how it finally concludes. Their death will be certain and it will be brutal, but life is a sequenced string of afflictions and torments. Ulquiorra has never known it to be anything else. 

However much later, a group of masked Shinigami in full black robes join Mayuri in the room. Very little is said as he unshackles them besides a barking command to stand. When Ulquiorra finally slides themself off the metal table and into a relatively upright stance, they are bound again, though this time only at the wrist and with chain in between.

He does not look pleased. It is an expression they recognize — one that would usually be followed by tirades explaining just how displeased the expression ranks. On another face. 

A white sheet is then hung over Ulquiorra’s head, directing their gaze down to their boots and nothing beyond, before they are escorted out of the laboratory by the masked entourage. Each has a grip on their arm, and a fifth leads them by the chain.

They can see nothing but the repetitive motion of their feet and the swaying of the cloth, its wrinkles and folds becoming as tall pillars of a wall. This is familiar, comfortable. Obedience. Bleached, uncharacteristic, stark obedience.

Look at where it’s gotten them.

That isn’t a point of mockery for Aizen. They don’t resent their quandary — it is the product of their own failure, despite having been given the correct tools. If they had resisted his sovereignty, they would have died long ago. 

After some meandering over stone pathway, dirt paths, and wooden planks, Ulquiorra is led down a long staircase. The further they walk, the darker it becomes, everything the same blue as in Mayuri’s laboratory. Cold, as well. Their breath comes out in visible puffs, wet into the cloth still hanging over them. If they could see far enough to the side, they would not be surprised to see the edges of their fingers and wounds scabbed with frost.

When the cloth is removed, Ulquiorra is left standing in a small square room. There are no windows. As the door closes behind the quickly evacuating escorts, there is no light to speak of besides the blue and the cold, which nearly become their own tangible entities.

Aizen had saved Ulquiorra, truly. His hands had peeled them upward from their quartz grave, breathed a name into their mouth and put the sword into their hands; given them agency to fight for their life and to eclipse the limits of those who had once thought themselves powerful. Vengeance had been a pleasant perfume on Ulquiorra’s tongue.

But now it’s how it had once been: they are small, insufficient, beaten against the slabs of a wind carved canyon not for lack of trying but for their lack of musculature and brute strength.

Ulquiorra leans their head against one smooth wall of their cell. It cools their cheek and their blood soaked brain, reducing the heated swell of their condition. Their body feels ill, pulled apart at every ligament only just enough to make them loose and gooey. 

Perhaps rolling over and exposing their soft stomach to a row of teeth ten thousand years ago would indeed have been preferable to this.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Following what they sense to have been a much longer wait than any previously, the door opens again. Days passed would not surprise them. Ulquiorra does not stand at attention from where they’d sunken against the wall opposite the door. Their shackled wrists rest on each knee, the length of chain still between.

Three Captains spread out into a line, spanning the room’s width. One is a small woman who clutches idly at a stumped wrist, one with white hair as long and gangly as his body, and the third peeking up from under the brim of a straw hat. Ulquiorra knew each of their names, in one form or another, but they care nothing for any respectful address or greeting.

No one speaks. What is expected of them? To deliver a eulogy for themself?

The one with the hat clears his throat and slips it off his head, holding it at his side instead.

“I’m Captain Shunsui Kyōraku. These are my associates, Captains Suì-Fēng and Jūshirō Ukitake.” Another long pause. “Ah, so… how are you?” 

Nearly rationalizing prodding their own eyes out. A prisoner of war. Self-explanatory. Next question.

“Get on with it,” the woman snaps.

“I’m only trying to be polite,” Shunsui whines, his tone still casual. She rolls her eyes at this. The other Captain wears a thin, fatigued smile. “Our apologies for taking so long. It’s been quite a bustle these last two weeks, as you can imagine.” 

Two weeks. It’s been quite a while, then. Others would have smeared their insides against the walls by now.

“You’ve been arrested and detained within the second level of the Central Great Underground Prison, Suiren, for attempting to overthrow the balance of Soul Society and committing direct acts of violence to its allies,” Suì-Fēng continues. “Your judgement has already been passed. It is a one thousand year sentence.” 

What a flowery speech to describe one thing: the spoils of war. It was almost a complete waste of her breath. If true justice were being enacted, Ulquiorra would already be dead. The silence and isolation of their cell is virtually a reward.

Suì-Fēng makes a sound of frustration. “Arrancar,” she spits, all venom. “They either talk too much or not at all. There’s no point to this. Just look at it. Mayuri’s done something to its head.”

Surely so. Ulquiorra cannot tell the difference between their body and smashed bird eggs, all of it melding together and becoming a frothy muck of malformed feathers and blood yolk.

“Let’s go now,” Ukitake shifts uncomfortably, and passes in front of Shunsui to edge closer to the door left open. Subtly, their hands brush. “We’ve delivered the news. We can see what comes of this later.” 

Shunsui lingers while the other two leave and fade into the blue of the prison’s hall. He is smiling. Not maliciously; only smiling and watching them. Ulquiorra does not shy away from meeting his unwavering gaze, dark from beneath the intense black of their lashes, the deep gouge of their brow bone.

Then he leaves as well. 

It must be another week or so during which Mayuri’s attendants often appear to tinker with their shackles and take samples of their blood, other fluids. Quick, easy visits, no longer than a few minutes each. Ulquiorra is still caked in their viscera, never once been offered a wet cloth or change of clothing. Shunsui is there most times, standing by the door and merely overseeing. Does it enthrall him? Is it some strange source of arousal for him to see his enemies so battered and bested?

This time, the laboratory hands are joined not only by Shunsui, but also Mayuri. He barks minimal instructions to the masked staff on how best to prod their body. More blood is taken, a scraping of their crackled skin from the arm branded by Murciélago, and a swab from the inside of their mouth. Then, the shackles are removed.

Before Ulquiorra can roll the joints of their wrists, Mayuri snaps a heavy metal bangle around the right one. It emits a momentary green glow from a line running the middle length of it, eliciting some sparking reiatsu from their arm but nothing more. There is a damp weight to it, both on the hand and on the mind.

“If it malfunctions with no one around to fix it, the albatross around your neck will be a dead arrancar!” is Mayuri’s final reprimand before everyone shuffles out.

Everyone except Shunsui.

This is becoming an element of exasperation. 

The listless bumblings of Mayuri’s cronies are tolerable, but the twinkle in Shunsui’s eyes when he observes them is insufferable. If he wants to poke a stick at a caged predator, he need only draw his zanpakutōs. It hasn’t stopped anyone else thus far.

“Poor Mayuri-san.” Finally, Shunsui. “He’s been working diligently on that,” he gestures with the brim of his hat to Ulquiorra’s wrist. “A bit unhappy we’ve forced him to expedite as much as we have. But it’s a bit more comfortable than the chain, I’d say.”

What rational mind would have much regard for the comfort of a prisoner? This is more visit than Ulquiorra expected out of the next millennium. Soul Society must be organized by the brain dead, then.

Ulquiorra leans their upper body back against the wall, their knees raised defensively. The wound in their stomach has since healed, but not without scar. They’d inspected the smooth silver gash dividing their navel a few days ago.

Shunsui sighs good-naturedly, scratching at his stubble. “Not too much of a talker. There won’t be much reason to asking if I can call you Ulquiorra-san, eh? So, Ulquiorra-san,” he turns away. “I suppose I’ll just call you that until you give me something else.” 

Ulquiorra does not give him anything. Not words, not recognition, barely even their full attention when he appears the next day, alone now.

“I’m very interested in you, Ulquiorra-san,” Shunsui admits with a shrug. “My friends — well, they don’t hold you in high regards, as I think you’re aware. I like to give people some credit. That sort of talk gets me more in trouble than anything these days. But I’ve heard about you. I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss you as just an animal on the grounds of what you can do. And if I’m being frank, Ulquiorra-san, I don’t think that letting you rot in a prison cell for a thousand years is a very good use of resources.”

Treasonous words. Is he prepared to back it up, or has he come to do nothing but puff his chest up at them?

He chuckles to himself and opens the door, which slides out from the thickly insulated stone walls. “I’m a gossipmonger in my old age. Where’d all the good days go, hm?”

Washed away with blood. Ulquiorra absently stretches one leg out onto the tiled floor, plucks at a blood stain gone crusty on their shirt. They don’t want to hear about this.

“Ah,” Shunsui pauses by the door, pressing his splintering hat to his chest. “There is something I should tell you eventually, though.

We have another Espada in the prison.”

That catches Ulquiorra’s attention. They’ve certainly not grieved — hardly even had a moment to recall their fallen countrymen. The complete annihilation of arrancar was very much an implied outcome of the war. But this is a point of mere curiosity.

“He’s proving to be a bit of a handful,” he continues. “The Octava, Szayel Aporro Granz.” 

_What?_

“Take me to him.”  

Shunsui seems momentarily taken aback by their request. Or maybe their voice in itself. “I — I can arrange —“

“Now.”

Ulquiorra stands, if only to solidify their insistence. They need to see this for themself: to confirm a corpse’s identity or sate their interest, it was all the same. Their fingertips tingle with stirred blood, their ankles locked from recent disuse, but their mind and vision are cleared of murky complaisance.

“Well,” Shunsui shrinks in posture. They’ve got him now. “I can sneak you a moment, I suppose…”

Good.

He leads them out of their cell and into the main floor of this prison level. Several other partially hidden lines in the bare walls denote more rooms, and a long staircase spirals both up and downwards in the centre of the lobby. They follow Shunsui up. He ensures he is always within an arm’s reach, if not immediately beside them. 

The first level is the same as the second, only marginally lighter but no warmer or differently hued.

There is a commotion erupting to the left. A small crowd of laboratory rats are convening outside the opened door, in varying degrees of confusion and helplessness. Ulquiorra whisks by of their own accord, entering the cell before Shunsui, though he is quickly looming over their shoulder. 

“Get away from me! Don’t — don’t touch me! Get away! Get away, get away, you’re not getting any closer to me!”

At the back of the cell, Szayel is thrashing violently against the wall and in the grasp of two attendants who each hold him by the upper arm. The three of them are all in a struggle. The heel of his boot lands a hit on an attendant’s thigh, which only makes her angrier. She grabs him by the calf, and he shrieks at the less than comfortable contortion.

He is in a bad way. One of Szayel’s palms is leaving bloody handprints from a wound there. No, not just a wound, a clean hole from front to back. A thick trail of blood leaks from a trauma to his chest, and his skin is freckled with burns and soot smudges.

He is theatrical, at least.

Then he notices Ulquiorra.

He meets their gaze incredulously and, for a moment, stops his fight. His entire body heaves from the effort, his hair mussed and pointed every which way, his cheeks flushed.

Golden eyes.

The right ones, this time.

Too easily distracted. He was only just spitting like a drowned cat until they walked in.

Before he can even utter a greeting, Ulquiorra’s hand has darted for the zanpakutō of a faceless attendant standing next to them, and flung it into Szayel’s throat. Szayel puts on a face of terror, his blunt fingers scrabbling at anything he can grab at, his voice hoarse and speaking only the vowels of Ulquiorra’s name, though it comes out through clumpy, red spittle.

Let him die, then, if he can think of no other way to escape but to beg for their help.

The room is in a stunned silence.

“Ulquiorra,“ Shunsui whispers. “Why would you —“ he cannot even finish the thought.

How is this, for animalistic?

The blade has plunged into the soft give of his jugular, and is lost beneath the torrent of blood that has been released. Szayel’s body seems to deflate as he becomes lighter, emptier, and is dropped from the Shinigami’s hold.

The question seems to loom – what now? 

The Shinigami who Szayel had kicked lays his spindly leg down and coughs. Sputters. Clears her throat, coughs again, until it turns into a fit and she can hardly catch her breath.

There it is. 

Her eyes are watering now as she falls to her knees, her jaw cracking with the effort of trying to breathe past a deep purple smoke that curls from out between her teeth. The natural borders of her body are being broken from the inside out, misshapen and redrawn as the smoke intensifies and grows, the squirming cells within it combining, writhing, creating a new shape.

It is the first time Ulquiorra has ever seen it; Gabriel.

But there finally emerges Szayel from the congealed womb of reishi, looking lukewarm as he flicks a glob of mucus from his shoulder. His wounds are gone, his skin renewed and glowing. 

“Dear, oh, dear,” he purrs, rearranging the slightly ruffled lay of his hair. “I was hardly prepared to test that again so soon! Now,” he points at Ulquiorra accusingly.

“What the fuck are _you_ doing here?”


	2. CORDON SANITAIRE

Soul Society did not take well to Ulquiorra’s delinquency.

Szayel did not take well to Ulquiorra’s survival.

It seems that everything in the world is once again at odds with them. No matter. They will be corporally punished and thereby end this misery, or they will be returned to their prison cell. Either outcome involves their being in an enemy land with a sword hanging over their head, physical or metaphorical.

At least now they’ve some presence in their judgement: they can hear Mayuri, Shunsui, and the Captain Commander bickering in the room behind them. They aren’t quite deserving of any agency. Only the privilege of hearing them being fought over by the executioners. Which paid more by the pound?

Szayel is standing across from them in the small hall outside the Captain Commander’s office. The both of them are again in manacles, though now with a vertical chain connecting wrist to ankle. He impatiently jingles his restraints.

A group of the First Division’s members have congregated at one end of the hallway, closely guarding this frightful pair. Most likely the first arrancar any of them have seen yet. Good. A dying breed, the blood of which now a delicacy to the edge of a hungry blade.

“I could take that little one, easy,” one of the Shinigami boasts, just loud enough to be heard.

“Bullshit,” his friends say. “That one caused all this trouble. Heroes are useless if they’re dead, that doesn’t inspire anything. Pinkie over there, sure.” A wave of mumbled agreement. Another, “You think it’d do anything if we had a little toss around with its friend?” A wave of mumbled _no._

“I’m your friend now, apparently,” Szayel says. He has more decency to speak quietly, privately. “Somehow, debatable, considering you didn’t even say hello before you _murdered me._ ”

“Hey,” the arrogant Shinigami from before. “Shut up, you two. This isn’t a place for you to mingle. You’re awaiting judgement.”

Judgement from who, Ulquiorra wonders.

The moment the door to the office opens, the crowd disperses frantically. Shunsui exits, Mayuri slinking out after him but walking the opposite way in a grumbling, fuming gait, not sparing a glance to Szayel nor Ulquiorra. 

Shunsui heaves a great breath.

“What a pain.” He clutches at the back of his neck, screws up his face like he’s working out a knot in his muscles. “Jū-chan’s really going to kill me over this.”

“Will Jū-chan do anything about these? Hm?” Szayel chimes in, pointedly dangling his chains in front of himself, making a clatter.

“One thousand years has been added onto Ulquiorra-san’s sentence,” says Shunsui, ignoring the pest Szayel’s made of himself.

Szayel laughs, all teeth. “Good!”

“— And five hundred to yours.”

He stops laughing.

“For _what?_ For _dying?”_

“You’re still going to complain? Hell’s bells, I’m not sure why I tried to defend you two in there at all.” Shunsui’s lip twitches in annoyance, despite his best attempt at remaining cool and even toned.

Ulquiorra’s attention phased out of this conversation long ago. One thousand more years, fine, perhaps by then Seireitei will have rusted and fallen apart like their chains. They’re more preoccupied with thinking about how much more peaceful life was when they presumed Szayel Aporro dead, and what it would take to walk back in time. 

“Ulquiorra-san,” Shunsui breaks them out of their reverie. “I tried.” 

What, is he remorseful that his enemies are being punished? Stupid man. They’re not sure what he wants out of them in return for this. Not to say that they’re much of a giver.

“I’m to escort you back to your cells in Suiren, now.” He continues. “I’ll also conduct your interrogations. We've at least decided that the information you hold is valuable."

So he needed all the details of the gore as well. So be it. He should prepare himself. 

Some days later, Ulquiorra is removed from their cell by the same black robed entourage as the first time and redirected to another cell. Inside, Shunsui is sitting on a small pillow in front of a low table, upon which he’s placed his hat. A collection of oil lamps dot the cell, clashing with the deep blue that incessantly permeates this plane. It stings their eyes, before they can adjust.

Szayel is sitting across from Shunsui, one of his hands splayed behind him to lean on. He looks petulant and defiant even though nothing is being done to him. Typical. 

He makes a repulsed sound, “ _Pfah_. I hate looking at that thing,” and turns his head away from where Ulquiorra has stood next to him.

Their right arm, of course. They understand — they were only just contemplating how to best chew it off, in the quiet of their confinement.

“Does it hurt?” Shunsui motions at them with his chin. Despite his best judgment, Szayel tentatively follows his gaze back to their arm.

No. It doesn’t hurt anymore; not in that searing, debilitating way. Sometimes the limb spasmed and the crackles in their skin lit up like jade ore veins. But that wasn’t something anyone besides Ulquiorra needed to know.

Especially not Shunsui. He won’t fool them. He’s still their enemy, on the other side of this table. He still corrals them into their cell.

“Don’t bother being friendly,” Szayel says. “They don’t understand a lick of it. No respect for the sanctity of life! In case we forgot, my throat was cleaved in half only a few days prior to our rendezvous here. The evidence is still all over them, should you choose to repeal some of my sentence…”

He’ll never let go of it. At least he’s moved on from what they once did with a limb off his specimen.

“Oh!” Shunsui lights up. He reaches to a small trunk with an ornate gold clasp placed on the ground beside him. From it he produces two neat stacks of clothing. “It must be unpleasant to still be wearing old clothes. If you’re going to be here for the next one thousand years at least, this might help!”

Leaving Ulquiorra to decompose in peace would help more. 

Still, they reach for the garments pushed closest to them, and unfold the one on top: a long white robe with tight sleeves and a black under-layer. Next on the pile is a high necked shirt identical to the one they currently wear. It must have been excavated from Las Noches. They discount the provided pants immediately. Theirs are clean and more practical than the wide legged ones of the Shinigami.

Practical for what?

It’s difficult to get the combatant out of Ulquiorra.

They change their clothing right there. Szayel makes a noise as if he’s attempting to stop them. They’ve nothing to hide. Their body is scarred, pierced, and branded. It’s something to be proud of.

They shrug the robe overtop the turtleneck before leaning back against the wall, crossing their ankles in front of themself and tucking their hands into their pockets. Szayel has not changed by the time they’ve finished. Modesty, from him?

Meanwhile, Shunsui has laid across the table a multitude of writing tools and pieces of paper from the same trunk. He grinds an ink stick into the palette and creates the sloppy mixture. Deep, black. Blood. Ulquiorra’s blood, so much of it that it turned viscous and endlessly dark. Their elbow throbs.

“Now,” Shunsui yanks them out of their unfocused stare into the ink. “I’ve been tasked with creating accounts of what happened at Las Noches from your perspectives.”

A sweet way to talk about an inquisition. 

Ulquiorra notices the tight awkwardness with which Shunsui grips the brush, his knuckles purpled and blotchy. They and Szayel are not so affected by the cold. They feel it, surely, the most basic of sentience could recognize it, but it’s one thing to understand something and another to allow it to crawl under the skin. 

“Let’s begin with Ulquiorra-san. Is it wrong to say that you had malicious intent when you first appeared in Karakura Town?”

A leading question. Their intent was to measure the strength of Kurosaki, and they recall their impression of such to be lukewarm at best. But it doesn’t matter, whether they said he was a threat to be disposed of or to leave him alone. Ultimately, they did not leave him alone. Ultimately, Ulquiorra’s very existence is malicious.

They work their jaw for a moment.

“No.”

“Was your original intent to locate Inoue Orihime for your subsequent kidnapping of her?" 

“No.” This is already tiring.

“Were you always aware of Aizen’s plan to kidnap her?”

“Yes.”

“And to mark her as a traitor to Soul Society?”

“Yes.”

“Talkative,” Szayel mutters. “I haven’t gotten that much out of you in the last month. This couples therapy session is going swimmingly, though it’s a bit grim in terms of subject matter.”

Shunsui pauses in his scribbling. He looks up, then looks between Szayel and Ulquiorra near comically. “You — two…?”

“A question for the record?” Ulquiorra taunts. They can hardly help it. This is none of his business, nor that of the library’s dust mites.

“Is that going to be a problem?” Szayel snaps. Defensive.

Shunsui’s chest tinges with embarrassment. “No, no, no, no problem!”

The tone has changed into something that Ulquiorra doesn’t fully understand, but nothing more is elaborated upon.

Shunsui dips his head lower as he returns to writing, until he asks, “Well — Szayel-san, you became an arrancar only recently, didn’t you? Isn’t it… strange?”

Don’t humanize him.

Where others have had one hand in the horrors that perpetuated Las Noches’s motions, he’s pushed in both of his. 

It is not a judgement. Ulquiorra has put their entire body on the line for the city, and for Aizen. 

But Szayel does not get to escape so easily only because he’s experienced a much nearer frame of humanity and still tastes it on his lips and in his dreams. For all they know, he’s never truly escaped, only learned how to combine essences of humanness and monstrosity. 

Yet at the end of it all, he is indeed monstrous. 

“Strange? What? That the afterlife exists? That the only entertainment I have left now is _Cifer_?” Szayel scoffs. “I don’t feel enough sorrow anymore to retell my life’s sob story with any passion. I was born, and I lived and I died, until I learned how to break this cycle. I think that is something more worthy of being talked about. Not who I was and what I did.”

“Hm. It was very impressive, your power.”

Szayel seems taken aback, lifting one eyebrow. The first compliment he didn’t have to beg for? “Of course it was impressive, if I did it.” The façade secured back into place. “Put that in your archive: ‘Respected Seireitei Captain impressed by an aberration, a shame of God’. We’ll see what everyone thinks of it.”

“I was under the impression that your god thought very highly of you.”

This has turned into a battle of wits. Ulquiorra crosses their arms loosely across their torso to remind Shunsui of their presence, one that is not interested in being privy to this.

He clears his throat and begins to pack his things. “Ah. Right. I think we’re done for today.”

The escorts grab Szayel from his seat first, then come for Ulquiorra. They see that he’s been placed in the cell next to theirs — but it doesn’t matter. There walls are impenetrable, whether by voice or by strength. They aren’t sure exactly what hex had been manufactured into their wristlet by Mayuri. Something tells them that they’d rather not find out. 

So, again, alone. It was a very whirlwind switch from Szayel’s constant chatter to solitude. They’d been in a slowly boiling vat of water, to realize the silence only when he wasn’t there to fill it.

Ulquiorra’s fingers run absently across their right arm, over the device on their wrist, combing through the frayed feathers. 

Rip it off. It would be easy. It may even regrow into a familiar shape. Rip it off. There’s no more blood on them, what did they fight for? What other trophy do they have? They should rip it off.

Ulquiorra leans their temple against where the door had melded seamlessly into the wall, sighing out through their nose, the loudest thing in this cell.

 

 

* * *

  

 

“— I’m going to lose my mind in there, Shunsui. Do you enjoy screaming prisoners throwing themselves against the wall? Does it reflect well on your penal institutions? I will _recidivise_ when I’m released in one thousand and _five hundred_ years!”

Shunsui blinks. “Is that a word?”

“It doesn’t matter!” Szayel gestures dismissively. He’s missing his gloves; some of his nails have chips and cracks, the thick pink lacquer worn off by teeth marks. “I realize you’re perfectly capable of pulling some strings. And,” Szayel flicks a piece of hair out of his face, gives a seductive flutter of his eyelashes. “I’ve been known to change a few boys' minds.”

Ulquiorra is standing at the wall again, their mind so foggy that it feels they’re overseeing this scenario unfold from outside their own body. They’ve become adept at tuning out Szayel’s streams, his mouth the delta of a polluted river. 

“Szayel-san,” Shunsui begins cautiously, folding his hands. “Seireitei is finally recovering from the war. No one is about to let some of the deadliest culprits that survived walk around the streets. Even if I wanted to, where could I put you so that you’d still be prisoners besides a prison?”

That was interesting. Some of the deadliest culprits. The art of words betrays him. 

“Who survived?” Ulquiorra says.

“I —“ Shunsui presses his lips together. He’s intelligent enough to know what they mean. “I’m not at liberty to say. There have been… developments." 

“Why haven’t _I_ had any developments, then?” Szayel is back on the attack, striking an accusatory finger to the table. “What do you want to know? I’ll talk. I’ll have afternoon tea with the Soul King and bare my heart.” 

So much for his loyalty. Ulquiorra didn’t know it could be exchanged for a bit of walking space so easily. But so many things were being flipped upside down in their world these days.

“It’s not about that. I’ve said too much as usual,” Shunsui groans when he stands, and picks up his writing tools. This time he’d been asking about the organization of Las Noches, but to no great extent before the topic veered. “Next week.” 

“I don’t care much for that man,” Szayel announces when he’s left the room, before the guards separate the two.

Neither does Ulquiorra. It is one of the few things they can agree on.

 

 

* * *

 

  

Szayel is quieter next week. Ulquiorra has finally migrated from the wall to the second pillow beside him, folding their hands on their knees. The tightness from their abdomen has disappeared by then, the deep soreness in the muscles relieved. Somehow they still expect to look down and see their guts spilling between their legs.

“Say, Ulquiorra-san,” Shunsui begins cautiously. They do not know why he still attempts to tip toe around his own words, their power contained as it is, their wrath as tempered as it is. They wish he would spit it out, inflict his words like a true bite. “You haven’t asked about Aizen.”

“I assumed.” He’s come to gloat. That’s fine. Ulquiorra has experienced their share of swollen egos — he is only that much better at hiding his.

“Not too much of a god, then, if he lost, eh?” There it is. Speaking his mind. Testing their limits. 

“You didn’t win.”

“We defeated him.”

“He is alive.”

“But he didn’t exactly _succeed,_ did he, Ulquiorra-san.”

“There is no one at his echelon. You will always have enemies.”

“Ah.” Shunsui seems to consider this perspective for a moment, regardless of how crudely and minimally stated it might be. “Does having his battles fought by proxy distance him enough from having enemies?”

Ulquiorra does not answer. There is little point, when both their and Shunsui’s minds have been made up about their respective positions. This is their contention with speaking, with words, with meaning; the intention is one, but the sound is another, and in that muddling enters an inherent slyness, a slithering snake in the grass whether one means to hiss or not. Hiding one’s nature behind the brim of a hat and a kind voice does little to hide preconceptions and supposed high grounds.

"What's his affinity towards you?" Szayel tilts his head towards Ulquiorra, speaks in a language only the both of them know. "Already found a new master to suck off underneath the table?"

Is he jealous? Good. It might smarten him up. Might teach him to not ask them such things again. A fist to the teeth would do the same, if they were any other Espada.

Shunsui ignores whatever had been said. Instead, “Well, Kurosaki Ichigo has recovered fully after regaining consciousness a month ago.”

Ulquiorra doesn’t care.

“— But I’m more interested in discussing what Orihime Inoue has to recover from.”

They still don’t care.

“She hasn’t discussed her time in Las Noches. Why do you think that would be?”

He’s wasting his time.

She had been their prisoner in a time of war. They had acted accordingly. To order, most times, though the exact how of it was to their malevolent discretion. The same laws do not apply across dimensions; he can keep them in as many bindings as he’d like. None of it would hold any ground outside the four gates of Seireitei. 

The look Shunsui gives them is sympathetic. Pleading. Nauseated. Perhaps he’s imagining everything one can do to the human form. “I think you and the other arrancar did some bad things, Ulquiorra-san. Worse than just keeping her in a cell and throwing away the key. I’d like to know about it.”

“Are you trying to rehabilitate me?” U lquiorra says.

It cannot be done. Ulquiorra encroached a certain line long ago that deemed it more fair to be killed for sins than to be pitied. They are not something deserving of mercy, nor do they want it. They’d rather a guillotine than a soft talking down to.

Charity would imply that their misfortunes have been dealt by a thing such as fate, that they recognize they have made mistakes. But they know what they’ve done. None of it was by accident. None of it was wrong. None of it was any more abhorrent than how they wanted it to be.

If the Gotei 13 did not want harms to come as they did, then they should not have sent mere children to the slaughterhouse. There had been no ambiguity regarding what Ulquiorra was capable of, or what they would do. 

Wind trails in Hueco Mundo sands were more regular than the play-pretend morals of Shinigami.

“I’m trying to enact justice.”

“I’m a hollow.” Ulquiorra’s tone has turned snappy. This is maddening. “Fuck justice. You put me in your prison. Leave me alone in it.”

Szayel is choking on a laugh behind his hand. It does not improve any tension between Ulquiorra and Shunsui.

The meeting ends on this note.

 

 

* * *

 

  

So it seems Shunsui took their advice. He does not call any more meetings — Ulquiorra has become better at measuring the week between each one, and several have already passed.

They don’t know what to do in their barren corral. They spend some scant moments picking at their nails, trying to peel away a more even shape to each one before forfeiting when the edges become jagged and they’re forced to rip the nail out for it to regenerate. Next, they brush their hair with their fingers, attempt to make it lay around the whorl of their horn’s root. They discover the most comfortable ways to tuck the hem of their pants into their boots. They move on to their toe nails and end up much in the same dilemma as with their left hand. The right is a tangle of flesh that doesn’t quite belong to them, and they’d prefer to not bother.

When all this petty entertainment has been depleted, Ulquiorra thinks.

The first thing that comes to mind is torrents of blood. It’s an involuntary notion, one that is based in natural inclinations and vice. Indeed only an animal would so readily imagine gore and fountains of carnage — they’ve been given too much acclaim as anything but. An elite animal, deserving of praise within their species, but anything else gives way for the softening of their spirit and leniency regarding their deserved punishments. That’s why Ulquiorra is here: their form has been misconstrued. Humans like Shunsui, Kurosaki, Orihime, each projecting mortal concepts onto them and thinking them in need of things such as equality, comfort, a voice.

The problem is that Ulquiorra is nothing more than a weapon. A bludgeoning tool that will not only clean itself off after the bloody deed, but the scene as well. Aizen was the only one who understood this. 

It’s difficult for them too to reconcile between being a sentience occupying a body and yet simultaneously estranged from possession of it. Despite being the only one in this cell, they are a mere observer. They pull the strings only to swing the sword — and now they lack even that.

But when they begin to think of their blood, all murky and yet fresh in the webbing between their fingers, they find that it’s a wound they don’t want to reopen. It’s sickening, to think of themself cleaved into multiple pieces as they’d been.

Ulquiorra doesn’t know why they’re still alive. They don’t know why they still want to be alive.

Something easier to digest, perhaps. 

They think instead of Szayel, and how he must have already flipped himself inside out a dozen times like a manic ouroboros. They think of the last time the two of them had met in Las Noches: his tongue’s mapping of every ridge of their mouth interrupted not for lack of trying but by a call to arms, the blurred pink lines of his lips, his flavoured balm the closest Ulquiorra would ever get to eating, to being human. 

“I’ll meet you later,” he’d said, not knowing how right he would be. His pompous grin rivalled the imitation sun.

 

 

* * *

  

 

Ulquiorra half expected that they would not be questioned anymore.

At the very least, it’s been a long time since the last. Or so they suppose. Time acts with a certain liquidity here, being poured around an unwavering place. They can’t tell what is or isn’t moving — the only certainty is that everything is turning to rot.

Themself included.

But Ulquiorra sits now, alone, in the identical square cell with the table and the pillows. The guards had merely closed the door behind them. Is this their new punishment? To mull over everything they’ve disclosed, and everything they’ve been told? At least they can break the table and ram the splinters through their skull when they’ve had enough.

Eventually, Shunsui enters, but doesn’t sit down as he usually does. Something’s ruffled his illusory feathers — he looks tired, with a tight slouch in his shoulders. He jumps into conversation, “I’ll make this brief: I’ll let you out of the prison if you agree to work with Soul Society.”

“You were adamant when Szayel Aporro asked,” Ulquiorra disputes.

“That was three months ago.” So long? “I needed a very good reason to even put the idea in the Captain Commander’s head.”

“What reason?” Their voice goes easily; this is the details of their fate, not a rambling dialogue that they need not reply to.

Shunsui smiles slyly. “That’s only for if you agree. There are things that need to be done for which we can’t spare our own people. I know,” he raises a hand as if to silence them. “I won’t belittle your intelligence and try to argue my way out of it: you’re an expendable asset. Or, you would be.”

Ulquiorra bites at the inside of their cheek. “Why should I?”

“I can’t answer that one for you.” Shunsui shrugs. “I think I would do many things to get out of a four walled room in the cellar. I meant what I said, the first time we met: I respect your abilities. This is what I’ve chosen to do for Soul Society, whether the effort is recognized or not… I think we can both agree that it’d be best if I didn’t flaunt your contributions publicly. Many of the Captains would be happier to throw me into the cell right beside you than think of this. There’s some things that they simply don’t need to know about. I don’t consider it a breach of peace, or treason — I’m not acquiring the powers of a Hollow, after all. Only utilizing them by proxy. A difference in morality isn’t punishable. 

“Anyways, there’s an old summer estate in Rukongai’s first district that an extinct noble family owned. With a bit of bribing and whining at the Corps Commander of the Detention Unit, we can keep an eye on you there.”

The unanswered question hangs in the air for several dragging seconds, until Shunsui blurts out a laugh and says, “Don’t tell me that you’ll say no even after all my hoop jumping.”

Of course. Would it be embarrassing for him? How would his ego survive that?

“I’ll do it.” Ulquiorra doesn’t want to see in blue anymore. It’s that simple.

Shunsui breathes out deeply, relieved. “That’s good. That’s very good." 

An escort arrives at Ulquiorra’s cell what seems like only minutes after. In reality, it must have been only a day since they spoke with Shunsui. In comparison to the three months they waited, any amount of time is a mere blink of the eye.

Ulquiorra is not being taken to the usual meeting place. They’re being led out, up the stairs and past the first floor of the prison. The atmosphere changes immediately once they’re outside — an innocuous, empty room with soft green walls and wooden trimming. It’s warm. The colours are vibrant.

One of the Shinigami places a seal over the two wooden doors they’d come through. Another crisscrosses a heavy reishi chain around the handles and frame. After this, Ulquiorra is led to the open air. The light of day pierces their eyes, forcing them to duck their head and squint at shapes of buildings, some tall and others only one storey, but all illuminated white stone with bronze tile roofs. The Shinigami take them down a steep flight of stairs tucked in the shadows between two of the tallest buildings.

In a small courtyard at the bottom, another entourage is waiting with Szayel. He’s looking at Ulquiorra with a bewildered expression when the two groups meet. He looks gaunt. The reprieve alone in his cell apparently did not do him any good, but at least he’s not foaming at the mouth and chewing his limbs.

“Cifer!” He shoulders past one of his guards to get to the front of the line, trying to catch up with Ulquiorra. “What’s this I’ve been told about you agreeing to work with Soul Society! I’ve never consented to this, I was never consulted, why am I being included!? I don’t recall ever having explicitly asked you to dictate my life for me! I’m not sure from where you’ve drawn the conclusion that you are my _caretaker_ —“

Szayel is so hot on Ulquiorra’s trail that his chest collides with their shoulder as they stop. He hardly deserves this moment of attention, their eyes on him, their acknowledgement of his empty complaints. If it was something that truly bothered him, he would undermine it. But how he loves the sound of his own voice, actualizing his self-pity.

He should understand that he will always be beneath someone’s boot. It would be a mistake to let him run unchecked and rampant.

Ulquiorra leans back to look him in the face properly. It is a poisoned, confident stance, one that prods and goads. Shoulders rolled back, one hip set askew, their face loose and pragmatic. He hates it, they know. He hates that they do not value him as he believes they should.

“Then go,” they say.

Nothing they have done to this point was ever meant to explicitly include him. If Szayel chose to so accordingly attach himself to their hip, then it was on his countenance for being a leech, and not theirs for accommodating his teeth. If he wants to turn himself over to the wolves of Soul Society and rot in a prison only to make a point for his ego’s sake, Ulquiorra will be the last to step out of line and stop him.

He bites his lip, surely not having expected any response out of them. The child whose thrown tantrum is legitimatized. “And where exactly would I go —“

What a useless conversation.

Ulquiorra has little time for him to speak circles around them in the middle of the First Division barracks. They continue walking with the guard. “Hell." 

He deserves it, if this is something he’s willing to throw his life away for.

In reality, his freedom was always artificial, dreamed up by him and him alone. Ulquiorra knows they will always belong to one power or another.

 

 

* * *

  

 

When Ulquiorra finally arrives at their glorified relocated prison, the sun has dipped down in the sky some amount, and its light becomes bearable on the eyes. The aforementioned estate lies just beyond the gates into Seireitei. A grand gate of its own keeps the house hidden behind a row of trees overgrowing the top of a pale grey stone wall. Rather, houses. Upon passing the gate, they can see a second, smaller residence. 

Szayel is being led there. They watch him go down the rock tile path before a guard pushes at their back, forcing them up the few steps to the first house. A long patio skirts the entire circumference of it, walled off with a preliminary layer of storm shutters and thinner paper doors on the inside.

The guards leave Ulquiorra in the low entrance room and shut the door behind themselves, their duty evidently done.

So what now?

Ulquiorra moves to force apart all the storm shutters at the back of the house. It allows some light in, gone purple and orange when they’ve finished. Dust speckles each shaft of fading daylight, uncovering cakey layers on every piece of furniture. Their fingertips sweep some of it off. Even Grimmjow’s tower in Las Noches had not been so unkempt.

At any rate, their work reveals a garden between their residence and Szayel’s, a wide pond spanning the length of the clearing. A red wood bridge connects both houses, though it seems to be missing some planks. A quaint forest of persimmon trees grows up against the back stone wall, beneath it flower bushes of all sorts.

Nature is not something Ulquiorra particularly cares for. They reenter, sliding the garden doors closed. Beyond this, there is only one large main room a bathroom. The bed mats, left made for however many years, are off to one side in a half room, the doors of which are permanently fixed and painted with a scene of an ocean.

They find a chair with a cushion that hasn’t rotted out of its bindings, and sit delicately, as though it will open into a metal jawed trap beneath them. They’re not sure whether they should melt into it or burn the estate to the ground. Night passes over them easily and quickly.

Ulquiorra spends the next days snooping. This is another world for them entirely, in the abstract sense. Possessions; items, clothing, pieces of land, art, plants. It is a strange thought to need all these things, all in varying levels of lavishness.

This family must have been particularly wealthy, they consider as they run a nail along the pearl teeth of a hair comb.

Shunsui appears several times, a short visit each one, to see how they’ve adapted. He treats them like an incapable child, or a stray animal he’s nervously nursing back into society. That’s fine with them. He knows their potential after the first incident with Szayel. They won’t prove his suspicions, but he should never allow himself comfort in their presence, in their dealings.

He says he’ll bring supplies, but retracts, looking uncomfortable when he realizes that they’ve no use for food or drink. The idea of drinking tea with him is resentful.

In the afternoon of the third day, Ulquiorra loots the trunks of clothing left behind. Some of the robes have holes and dead bugs sitting in the sleeves, but others come away smelling herbal and with barely a wrinkle. Most of it is too traditional or formal. They deign forcing themself into anything particularly decorative, or something their limbs will get stuck in.

After gathering a few simple pieces from a bureau by the bed mats, all black or white, they take their pillaging to the room with the bath.

A long shelf with glass jars lines the wall behind the deep wooden tub. Ulquiorra opens and smells a few, but they can’t recognize any of the scents. What would they have to recognize if not dirt and characterless concrete? It would not be a popular fragrance. The more viscous oils infused with shimmering particles and fermenting flowers would be of interest to Szayel, no doubt. They grow bored when they reach a row of acrid tonics.

They pick the safest choice, a bar of soap, before fiddling with a rusted tap. It creaks and gurgles, but eventually produces a stream of water which pours into the wooden floor grate. Ulquiorra wastes no time in shrugging off their clothing, tossing it aside carelessly, and scrubbing away layers of crusted blood and skin with the scentless soap. They wash their hair just the same, sitting on the small stool nearby to do so. 

They only skim over their right arm. Perhaps another time.

Eventually Ulquiorra turns the tap off and dries their body with their old clothing.

They slip into a new robe; a black suit with no sleeves, a high neck, and tight pant legs. An observant guess implies it had belonged to someone who practiced hakuda. Only their boots remain from their original uniform, going easily over the silky fabric.

The sensation is uncanny: dressed as the enemy.

It does not linger.

Ulquiorra goes to rummage through the other closets, until Szayel comes to their room that evening.

They’re awake to see him do so. They haven’t yet tried to sleep here, neither in the cell nor the estate — unable to stop sensing, however minimally, the presence of watchful spies at every corner and through every crevice. Little acid droplets of reiatsu, slow fed into their blood, every channel of their consciousness. It is a state of high alert, to be so unnaturally surrounded by the enemy, for their own nature to call into question why those pinpricks haven’t been dulled.

He slides the door open, leaking slats of dull candlelight from the hallway until he closes it behind himself. He fumbles with his body for a moment, as though he has only just acquired control of it again, before he leans against the wall by Ulquiorra’s unused futon. 

“I can’t sleep either.”

They wonder why he’s bothering to tell them that. 

In Las Noches, Ulquiorra had barely ever considered the concept of sleep. Aware of it, yes, of needing it, but their blood was so foamy with electrified discipleship that their eyes never closed longer than their slow blinks. The bodies of arrancar are so different from those of humans, dead or alive. Sleep is a reverent ritual here; Ulquiorra watches from the crack in the outer garden door each level of Seireitei flicker out and become cold, in gradual waves as the hours passed.

Szayel, too, they remember, hardly slept. His eyes were more often than not gouged deep with exhaustion. Whatever drove him in those early days of loyalty was not up to them to guess at. He slaved in his laboratory for months on end, until Ulquiorra had become his bedmate and sleep was an opportunistic time-spend.

Dreams? No. Visions, more like. Visions of utopia, victory, sainthood.

It hardly matters anymore. Those beds burned with Las Noches. 

Ulquiorra rises from the low chair they’d placed by the garden patio, untangling their legs as they go, and stands in front of Szayel. It is almost like for the first time, in this new darkness and new light and new dimension. The same, as he was, and as they were, but washed with a different water. 

He is still tall, even against the wooden wall as he is, his back ramrod and his hands folded behind his back. Still thin, without any real substance in the valleys and gorges between his bones, his clothing lacking enough elasticity to follow the dips of his ribs and collarbones, which only accentuates the depth. But his hair has grown, wispy lengths that he’s swept to one side and tucked behind his ear without much care.

He is nothing special. Ulquiorra has no eye for the attractiveness of others, has no way to measure it, to even conceive criteria or meaning for it. 

Finally, Szayel unclasps his hands, and moves to cup their jaw in his warm, rough palms. His thumbs play the sharp edge of their cheekbones, catching the fallout of black powder and a clumpy, lost eyelash. He hasn’t touched them since a brief moment shared in his laboratory before the Shinigami first breached the dome. That was eons ago.

He looks into their eyes, then down to their gnarled arm, and he takes his touch away.

Coward.

Then, a knocking at the door. After some moments of it not being answered, two members of the spy corp assemble in the main room. It was a fast response, more so than Ulquiorra expected. 

One pulls down a black cloth mask. “You are not permitted to be alone together without the supervision of a Captain,” she says, turning to Szayel. “Return to your residence.”

When it’s clear that the Shinigami will not leave until he does, he throws up a hand in acquiescence and leaves as quickly and quietly as he’d come.

Ulquiorra turns back to the open doors, watching the flickering lamps of his porch across the pond. The night is soft and breezy on their cheeks. They’re still unaccustomed to that — air, in more forms than the simplicity of existence. 

Even existence is hard to fathom at times.

  

 

* * *

 

 

Ulquiorra senses Shunsui’s reiatsu approaching the next morning. That ability works better in Soul Society than it did in the destroyed Hueco Mundo, but it’s a dull flame with the shackle around their right wrist. The device makes everything stale and heavier, not restraining but more as if parts of them are being stowed away.

He should be here by now, removing his sandals in the doorway as he usually does. They stand from their chair, stretching out their knees and feeling the bones in their ankles crunch back into place as they do.

From the gap in the paper dividers, Ulquiorra sees that the door is open. The garish pattern of his pink haori fills the entire space, but he’s not facing to enter.

“Kyōraku!” A muffled voice from outside. “What are you doing here?”

“Jū-chan,” Shunsui winces. “How lovely and surprising to see you here. Only you could look more radiant and beautiful than this morning! Taking a walk? I am! This is my favourite district.”

“I _followed_ you. So this is where you’ve been disappearing to lately? It doesn’t look like anyone’s serving sake here." 

“You — I — well. I’ve been watering the garden?”

“For the ghosts?”

“Exactly!”

Suddenly, there’s some noise of a struggle, and a head of white hair emerges. The Captain fromUlquiorra’s first introductions. His eyes widen when he sees them, and then shrink in confusion, attempting to put the pieces together. 

“Let me explain.” Shunsui grasps the other Captain by the bicep, a gentle touch. 

“You’d better start,” Ukitake snaps.

“Ulquiorra-san has agreed to help Soul Society with… those emerging issues I spoke to you about. It would be more comfortable for our newfound ally to stay here, and so I’ve been visiting concerning this arrangement is all.”

“The Captain Commander agreed to this?”

“Somehow. Yama-jii drives a hard bargain.” Shunsui relaxes his hold, slips his fingers through the end of that long hair on the way down. Ulquiorra twitches an eyebrow up imperceptibly at this. The two are close, apparently. “Considering your tone, what did you think I was doing?”

“I thought —“ Ukitake’s forehead creases. “I’m not sure what I thought. I should… get back to my Division. I’ve already spent enough time away from my paperwork chasing you around. You should do the same, if you know what’s good for you.” Under his breath, he utters, “We’ll be having a long conversation tonight.” Ulquiorra nearly misses it. 

Shunsui waves his hand back and forth dismissively. “Of course, of course. Don’t exert yourself, now.” When Ukitake sets off, hesitantly at that, he slumps against the front door and rubs at his temples. “I need a nap,” is his concluding grumble. 

Ulquiorra too. If only they weren’t in the thick of the enemy.


	3. SOCIAL CONTRACT

Several weeks into their measured freedom, Szayel slinks into Ulquiorra’s room. They sense him long before he slides open the hallway door, the murky taste of his company familiar enough. It is not strange, for this to happen. After summoning the Detention Unit to come collect him every night, the Shinigami have been forced to accept that he will slither out of his cage and into Ulquiorra’s whether they like it or not. Perhaps Shunsui put in the word to give the effort up.

Just as well. Szayel’s touches and mindless affections come easier now. It seems he could not go very long without it, choosing instead to swallow back his bile whenever he was reminded of their disfigurements.

A breeze enters through the open doors Ulquiorra sits in front of, still a foreign touch on the air that carries more than a stale desert wind ever had. It smells of the sweet, heavy boughs of persimmon trees edging past a time for picking, the fountain that spouts into a self-replenishing creek and its mild water. And Szayel. He still smells of nothing; faint undertones of bleach. It’s not something that belongs here.

He parts their folded knees, pushes them back onto their elbows with the rearrangement, and kneels between their opened thighs.

“ _Ulquiorra_ ,” a very sing-song tone, a very sweet kiss on the vulnerable length of their neck. What does he want to convince them of, and why does he still think they are susceptible to his charm? “I’ve recently come into… _ownership_ of some money, and a wave of exploratory curiosity has simply overtaken me. I think we should see what Seireitei has to offer to quell my appetite.”

Is he not so proud of himself. For what? Being a pickpocket? A purveyor of petty thievery?

He’s gone mad with boredom, evidently. Ulquiorra doubts this is something they want to participate in.

But Szayel is looking at them expectantly, as if he cannot do this without an accomplice. One of their eyebrows twitches upwards. He infers their meaning, laughs, and pulls them up.

Leaving is easy. No one stops this pair of miscreants. In fact, neither Szayel nor Ulquiorra had once been instructed _not_ to leave the grounds. It was a self-imposed prison, one that was implied, the hand of constant, quiet surveillance forced by an inherent dislike of every breath a hollow takes.

A breathing hollow is a living hollow, and a living hollow is a threat. This much Ulquiorra can understand. What they cannot understand is the restraint of Shinigami — all wielding weapons and faced with an invasive species, beings constructed of pure evil, and yet staying the blade. A work of the stubborn heart, perhaps, that there is some perceived worth to Ulquiorra’s life (much less Szayel’s).

Szayel steps cautiously over the threshold. There is no hidden wire to trip him. He is free to go.

“Come, now,” he says. He walks down the small wooden stairs connecting to the porch. There is grass so green it glows planted around the dirt path that leads to the main street, only seen through the gate bisecting the stone perimeter. “Fresh air is good for the cadaver, and so on, so forth. You would benefit from the sunshine, at least!”

Ulquiorra falls into step beside him, an easy and purposeless pace. His hand rests on the dip just above their tailbone.

They walk until he finds a store that interests him, into which he sweeps with an excited speed. Ulquiorra can sense the trailing spy corps, nestling in wait and watch outside the store, though through no failure of the Shinigami’s abilities at subterfuge. It is only that they are more perceptive. Smarter, in certain capacities. More in tune with the rolling waves of the universe.

When they catch up, Szayel is handling a black wooden tin decorated with gold etching. He swipes the contents onto his wrist, an orange-red powder of some sorts. He moves on to others; a white powder, a glossy red, a white haired brush he takes some delight in, but none of them seem to resonate.

Ulquiorra is familiar enough with the concept of a store. This one must be of a higher quality than others, judging by the furnishings. The shop owner is hunched over behind a glass case, staring at her store’s intruders through it, her eyes bulging out of her skull, her skin moulting with feverish pallor and contrasting red flush.

It must have been a long time since she’s had to acclimatize to pure power walking into her store.

Or pure evil.

Finally, Szayel decides on something. He directs Ulquiorra’s attention to it with a pleased noise — a pink haori made out of a thick silk, most likely meant for the upcoming winter. Delicate details of golden leaves and ornate curls are sewn into the fabric, patches of negative space contrasted by clusters of heron designs.

He buys it, depositing a generous pile of coins on the merchant’s counter, lingering to see if the owner will do anything with it besides shudder violently. Apparently not. Szayel shrugs and folds the haori himself.

By the time the two leave, the sun is low in the sky, painting stripes of clouds orange and mulberry, the day shorter each time, and each time the continuity of it stranger.

When they return to the estate to no incident or reprimand, everything as it was left, Ulquiorra undresses. They turn around, and Szayel is holding the haori up to them.

“Put it on,” he urges softly, helping them shrug into it. It’s too big, sagging off them, but he seems pleased by this. His warm hands pull it loosely closed over their front.

Szayel reads for some time with his feet tucked under the kotatsu. They watch him, until he glances over at them, and closes the book with little regard for keeping his place. His fingers trace a lazy line over the hem of the coat, evidently appreciating it more than Ulquiorra. But then his palm pushes the fabric off their shoulder and he creates similar patterns in their skin, and they are sated in their vie for his attention.

Ulquiorra turns into his kiss, allowing Szayel the privilege with no protestation.

He’d had to teach them how. He complained incessantly, whining into their mouth; too wet, too much teeth, not enough, put the hand here, put the tongue there. What did any of it matter? He got what he wanted in the end. He always came crawling back for more.

The haori will wrinkle if he lets them keep it on. But he pushes them onto their back, encouraging the coil of their arms around his neck, and says nothing about it.

Shunsui’s reprimand does come eventually.

He’s peeling a fruit apart the next morning, a snack he’d mentioned fondly that Ukitake insisted he take. Who knew there was so much to say about citrus.

“Regretfully, I must say that I think I’ve been too lenient with you two,” Shunsui chews around the last segment, pacing leisurely around the main room. “I heard some rumours of two oddly dressed people wandering the streets yesterday. One with a horn. I’m not sure who _that_ could be, really.”

Is he giving Ulquiorra and Szayel a chance to confess?

Szayel clicks his tongue. “Too conspicuous, my little Bernini. Ever considered cutting it off?” They’d like to see him try.

“You can’t just leave like that,” Shunsui says this with a tone flat enough to be serious. “The Detention Unit sure gave me an earful in the middle of the night. Let’s not do that again, if only for the sake of my sanity.”

“You’re the only one in the room with some left.” Szayel drawls as he picks at the undersides of his nails. Ulquiorra is standing beside the writing desk he’s sat at, and he lolls his knee into their thigh, a purposeful point of contact. “My days of wine and roses, pulled from underneath me! So lovely while they lasted.” He smiles knowingly up at Ulquiorra from beneath his fluttery eyelashes.

This seems to appease Shunsui for now.

“While I’ve got you both here, it seems about time to explain what you’ll be doing for Soul Society.” Shunsui produces a scroll and unfurls it on the desk. Ulquiorra can’t read anything on it, only trace topographies with their eyes. “This is a… working map of Hueco Mundo. It’s been quite difficult, even after centuries, to get an accurate contour of it, but if we place Las Noches as the most obvious landmark here,” his finger taps the centre of the page which is marked by a sun symbol, “then this map accurately depicts one hundred kilometres in either direction. It’s enough for your purposes.”

Szayel looks up warily. “We’re returning to Hueco Mundo?” He sighs and writhes in his seat, making himself more comfortable to crane forward over the map. He gestures to the left of Las Noches, but just off the edge of the paper. “Here, a little further than what you’ve encountered, there are a few ruins. Completely abandoned, and outside of the jurisdiction of Las Noches, once belonging to Barragan. Rather useless and second-rate in architecture, if I must say, and I must.”

“Hm.” Shunsui scratches at his stubble. “I’ll pass that along. Might be important.”

“I never say anything that isn’t important.” Another jab of Szayel’s finger, above the city. “I was unable confirm or deny before the invasion, but I may have detected a body of water in this region. There is a ravine that blocked my initial probes, and I never bothered since. I’m sure you can understand that _water_ is not exactly a priority for hollows.”

Shunsui hums again. “Shame. Sōsuke always liked his tea.”

Ulquiorra’s entire body churns. The name itself will do that — the name itself holds power. They can almost still taste the murky leaves they’d been fed, and the black sludge that’d come up and out of their throat with it afterwards. It was sacramental. It is not something that should be spoken of so lightly. On command, they would have imagined a suitable punishment: they toy with the concept of dangling Shunsui’s tongue above the snapping maws of desert beasts.

“… Indeed.” is Szayel’s hesitant reply. “What exactly needs doing in Hueco Mundo? I will make a very educated guess and say that the entirety of Las Noches has been overrun by raving cannibals and smashed the rest of the way into the ground.”

“See, now, that’s just it.” The map is rolled back up into the fabric sash at Shunsui’s waist. “From what I’ve been told, numbers of arrancar and adjuchas have declined sharply — and it’s not because of us. Munching on humans in the World of the Living? Ah, that’s no good, but we have no reason to enter Hueco Mundo to purify hollow. It’s a bit of a mystery, really.”

“Who is getting these numbers?”

“Mayuri-san!”

Szayel slams his back into the chair, crossing his arms adamantly. “I won’t work with that vermin. _For him!_ Even worse! No. I won’t.”

He may have already had no say in the matter: _Granz’s generous donation will be much appreciated._ Ulquiorra had best not even consider what was meant by this, much less disclose it to him.

“Szayel-san,” Shunsui begins warily. “If you don’t agree to this, I’ll have no choice but to send you back to Suiren.”

“It sounds lovely, considering my options.”

What a nuisance he is.

“Szayel Aporro.” It is all Ulquiorra needs to say, their tone commanding and harsh. Las Noches need not stand to bolster their superiority over him. His jaw goes tight as he grinds his teeth together, pointedly not meeting their gaze. It may very well be too much at that moment, lest his marrow turn to slop in his bones.

“Fine.” Szayel spits it out like he’s been grievously attacked. On a personal front, yes. He’ll have to recover his ego somehow. “But let it be known I find it a grave injustice that I’m being forced to cooperate with everyone who had a hand in my most recent deaths. When shall it be my turn to do the same? Why don’t you bring Uryuu or Nemu in? I’ve plenty of ideas for what they can do for me besides giving me another warm body.”

A repulsed noise from Shunsui. “Anyways,” he says pointedly. “The mission is fairly simple. Over several expeditions, you’ll place a variety of sensors around Hueco Mundo to keep monitoring the numbers, detect any potential suspicious activity. You can ask Mayuri for the details. I don’t know much of the technical hocus-pocus that goes on at the Twelfth — I try not to ask. He’s a little intense!”

“I’m not impressed.” Szayel loops his arm around the back of the chair, his nose high in the air. “This is child’s play. I can get that work finished in one day, less without Ulquiorra’s _claws_ in the mix. What will we do after?”

“I don’t know. Truth be told, this might turn out to be nothing at all. But I’ll keep my promise. I’ll do what I can to keep you out of prison, if you do well.”

Szayel sighs so deeply it shudders his feather thin body. “To have to trust a Shinigami — I’ve truly reached the lowest of the lows.”

 

* * *

 

 

Two days before the first excursion, Shunsui brings Ulquiorra a wooden box.

It is a long thing, not very wide, and with a lid that only slots loosely into place. In their lap, atop their thighs, they open it. Inside: a black sheet of velvet lining the bottom, and their broken zanpakutō. Their fingers run up her fragmented blade, the singed fibres of fabric at the hilt, the roughness of each folded steel layer at her fracture point.

“It will reform, no?” Shunsui says, lingering by the door.

Ulquiorra allows their silence to speak for itself: no. It will not.

Murciélago’s purpose has been scorned, defiled by her own evil and in the melding to their stained, marked right hand. The blade is empty. It is barely functional to be served as a ceremonial guard, to ordain similar ministers of treachery. What pedestal is required for a useless sliver of metal that will never again sip from streams of blood?

Ulquiorra’s eyes dart down to their hip, where Murciélago had once been brandished, where only a deep absence of a scabbard now sat.

“Ishida Uryuu found it. I’d say you should try thanking him if you see him, but, well…”

Is he joking? They distinctly recall pulling a black blade out of Ishida Uryuu’s torso, and the sparks of his arrows catching on their hierro still tingle memorably.

Underneath the lining, they find the steely green sheath which has been similarly shortened and capped at the cut end with a metal piece. Murciélago is too short to tuck into their sash now as they once may have. They loop the cord across the small of their back and slot Murciélago into the sheath, letting it lay horizontally.

At least it would keep up some appearance of danger.

At least it would make their own body feel that much more familiar.

Ulquiorra brandishes it the same way when Mayuri and his team come to the estate. The captain himself does not speak very much, only pensively watching the proceedings with his wide teeth showing. Ensuring that nothing is misspoken by his subordinates, and no doubt attempting to placate the metaphorical daggers being thrown between him and Szayel.

Everyone is standing around the desk when one of the assistants places a metal cube on it. It looks light, with a simple monitor and antenna peeking out the top.

“This is the reiatsu sensor,” she says. “It detects and stores every unique reiatsu that comes into its range, and it can do some minor analysis regarding the level of the hollow. More suited for just collecting bulk data. The hard drive will need to be transferred to the main laboratory and cleared every week, maybe more often depending on how the numbers go.”

“This one,” she says as a second Shinigami places another cube next to it, this time with a heavier _thunk._ “creates patterns of movement with the data from the sensors. Maps, triangulations, the works. We can infer how hollow are behaving with each other, like making packs or if reiatsus disappear in certain densities or areas. It can intermittently transmit some of its information to our lab, but the signal is usually unreliable, so you’ll have to clear its storage too. If we tinker with the technology a bit more, eventually you’ll put up some wireless access points to improve the signal.”

The Shinigami finally catches her breath and bites at her lip uncertainly. “Is that — was that okay? Did you get it all?”

Szayel waves his hand at her. “I’m not some derelict apprentice. Of course I understand. Show me how it assembles and we can get to work soon.”

She does so, in mostly technical language that Ulquiorra lets muddy in their ears, their eyes becoming lost in tracking the movement of her hands and the sliding metal gauges, screws, and wires.

“As you can see, we’ve streamlined much of the process to make it as easy as possible to do in the field, very few individual parts that need to be attached or put together. The screen will prompt you further on how to proceed with connecting all the sensors once it’s on, but it’s straight forward.”

“Show him anyways,” Mayuri croaks.

Szayel furrows his brow. “I can manage.”

“I’m not leaving it up to you.”

The Shinigami flushes slightly, being caught in the midst of this. “Here — see, you just select this option…”

“I can manage,” Szayel snaps.

“He can manage!” Mayuri drones back. “He can manage the division’s finances after we’ve lost funding for leaving everything in the hands of hollow we’ve defeated.”

Szayel and the girl fiddle with the screen and its control panel, him wearing a soured expression and leaving sarcastic quips all the while.

Now done to Mayuri’s satisfaction, a second unmade set of the sensors is left for Szayel to practice with.

“Finally,” Mayuri’s assistant fumbles around in her coat pocket before producing a small communicator. On the front is an extendable antenna, and it flips open to a bigger display and keypad. “It gives you direct access to Soul Society and the lab. You can use it to update us on your progress and alert us when you’re on your way back. Emergencies, too, if anything comes up. The main screen is a tracker that shows your current objectives, the coordinates to place the sensors at.”

Szayel takes it without another word.

When everyone is gone, Szayel braces one palm on the desk by the spread out equipment and tangles the other into the short hairs at Ulquiorra’s neck. Not so short anymore. His nails scratch absently at their scalp, tingling down the root of their spine, making whorls in the black strands.

“Even corpses grow hair for a while,” he notes dryly.

Then he returns to inspecting everything the Twelfth brought.

Some hours into the night, a member of Mayuri’s research team comes to see them through the Garganta that Ulquiorra tears open with a flick of their wrist. An odd method; from the side it is a deceiving glimmer of shadow no thicker than a sheet of paper, but from the front it is a static skin through time and space. Szayel had once attempted to explain it, to little avail only because they’d not been paying close attention.

Szayel presents the communicator from the briefing, already open and switched on to a field dotted with lighter and darker indicators. Good, then. Ulquiorra need not bother with learning how to use the device. The Shinigami leans over to look at it and nods.

"One more thing. Your arm." Ulquiorra extends their right towards her. She grabs their wrist and inserts a flat card into the bottom of the bracelet, and it comes apart. She tucks it into her coat pocket with the key. "Just for the mission."

Ulquiorra almost prefers the shackle; the hairline rifts between their skin and the feathers glow a faint green, full again with bubbling reiatsu.

Mayuri must want them dead.

“You’ll enter Hueco Mundo in Las Noches. On your tracker is marked where there have been sightings of strong hollow, and where Mayuri-san needs the transmitters set. Act with caution. Or don’t, you have free reign to scout the area as you please. Our people have been withdrawn already.”

Szayel lurches forward, complaining immediate on his tongue just by his sour look alone. “Ah, so we’ve been relegated to your most dangerous grunt work! I see how this —“

The back of Ulquiorra’s hand across his chest halts him, physically and verbally. They don’t bother mumbling any farewells before they venture into the mouth of the Garganta.

The other side of the Garganta opens to Las Noches the necropolis.

Collapsed buildings have become markers for graves, piled into multiple-body sarcophagi. Streaks of blood where the city has come undone atop groups of arrancar and unlucky curious hollow splatters the architecture. Inky numbers seared into exposed, raw flesh now refer to death tolls rather than rank.

“This way,” Szayel says, looking down at the communicator. He shoulders one black bag full of supplies for the sensors, and Ulquiorra carries another.

It’s difficult to tell if what crunches under their feet is bone or rubble.

The coordinates lead to a clearing in the midst of several downed towers, its exact placement partially concealed beneath their shadows. Szayel unpacks the bags to find each piece for the simpler sensor, but he struggles slightly in the patchy darkness overhead.

“Mayuri picked these coordinates on purpose,” he mutters conspiratorially at one point when he grabs the wrong gaggle of wires. It delays the process only marginally. He buries the first reiatsu sensor under a layer of sand thick enough to conceal it, but thin enough to still retain a signal.

On to the next.

Szayel picks a path the opposite way from the clearing, down a dune that’s formed around a displaced staircase. Ulquiorra can make it effortlessly, floating themself down the precarious ledges with soft steps.

So this is what Shunsui envisioned as a good use of their ability.

It’s nothing they can’t handle. They can keep up with fifteen hundred years of being Mayuri’s steward.

Using sonído to create stepping stones in the dense air, they follow Szayel up to the flat roof of a hall. He rummages the supplies again, building the more complicated machine. Ulquiorra looks to the other side of the building, where the roof and wall has been exploded outwards.

“Be a dear and hold this,” Szayel extends a gauge to Ulquiorra. They take it loosely, their fingers twitching around it by instinct, and immediately stray from where he kneels by their side to investigate the hole.

Ulquiorra stares down at Aizen’s throne.

Burn marks and now-ancient blood mottle what’d once been streakless purple tile. But the marble throne remains, unmarred, without so much as a footprint on the pedestal. They’d stood there, for a moment. It seemed fate that the Caja de Negación had deposited them there, but what had followed was their ruination — perhaps a fate that luck overlooked.

Luck. Fate.

Bullshit.

Kurosaki Ichigo’s rancid hollow reiatsu lingers on the edges of this destruction, an evil coating of sovereignty. But if Ulquiorra were to look up — their own reiatsu licks at the shattered dome, the biggest breach in the sky. The epicentre of their death.

Their entire body aches in such a way they think it’s all coming apart again, and that if they linger any longer someone will have to grab handfuls of their corpse out of the breeze.

Mayuri must be doing it on purpose, then.

“Head in the clouds?” Szayel’s saccharine voice, suddenly, at their ear. His body sways into Ulquiorra’s, forcing the toes of their boots onto the pit’s brim. He smoothes one hand over their chest while the other pries away the gauge he’d given them. “What a terrible old dog you are — can’t even play fetch right. Barely even knows its own name. Should I get a whistle?”

He attends back to the sensor with only a chuckle to the back of their neck.

Something else grabs Ulquiorra’s eye, out in the sand to the right where the buildings thin out and the sun still illuminates. Something glinting white and like metal beneath the exposure.

There is a tall, mysterious being in the desert.

It is not necessarily something with a soul, nor is it a human by height alone; exceeding six and a half feet with ease. Of a physical matter, though, yes. There are varying degrees to hardness: that intangible, multi-dimensional kind of arrancar who are built out of concept alone, or the kind that hands unawares cannot pass through, that bleeds and whose cells respire.

The being is poised over the carcass of an unnamed arrancar, so similarly dressed in white that it seems near an insult.

Though Ulquiorra has no qualms in approaching it for further investigation, a glance over their shoulder tells them that Szayel has not yet finished assembling the sensor. He’s attempting to push in the display and connect its wires. It’s no more than a few hundred metres away, but not facing towards the building where they stand.

The clawed fingers of their right arm twitch and tingle, almost as a reminder. It’s been many months since their reaction to their bala, but it’s also been many months of wearing Mayuri’s bracelet — they don’t know how either functions.

Szayel is still working.

“Szayel,” they say.

He hums. “Just a moment.”

Fine.

Their prudence is set aside when the being moves.

Rather, something from within it moves.

The shapeless cloak it wears moves aside for no less than a dozen tendrils, some deeply piercing the arrancar’s corpse and others simply poking, prodding at it. The same clinical manner had once belonged to Szayel as well. It seemed long ago.

The arrancar’s body is nearly pulsating, convulsing with each rough motion of the tendrils which tear and feed into muscle and turn over lifeless limbs. Blood splatters carelessly, clumping up in the sand.

The looming figure turns around and notices Ulquiorra, or at least the tendrils do.

It’s fast.

One of the extremities has nearly reached the building and began creeping up the side of it, adjusting its warpath towards Ulquiorra.

They have no option but to try: they gather their reiatsu and fire a bala at the encroaching tendril from their left hand.

It’s no use. The last thing they see before their vision doubles and becomes blurry is their bala — weaker than they’d known it to be — strike the tendril, reduce it to a soot mark, and cauterize its flailing end. There are many more approaching, no doubt, and now Ulquiorra has rendered themself even more useless.

“— Ulquiorra?”

Extreme pain, as with all the other times. There are only so many ways they can describe it, and only so much their nerves can process or even register. Numbness, though not blissful in any sense. They crumple to their knees, but, still standing on the edge of the pit, they stagger. Ulquiorra tries to cling to its fringes, grasp at the stones to keep themself on the building’s roof, but their fingers fail like the weak, worn crease of a paper.

Just as well. Their body can imagine nothing but retreating into itself, cradling their burning right arm to their stomach, nearly folding in half over it.

Ulquiorra only recognizes that they’ve fallen through the hole when their hip and pelvis crack onto the armrest of Aizen’s throne, again on the other side on a step, and finally on the floor.

Like a beast of burden brought to heel at the feet of its master, they writhe on the cool tile, smearing their open and gasping mouth, gathering the taste of holy dust. But they don’t lose consciousness. The pain is more localized to their corrupted parts, at the most extreme ends of their ligaments they are already losing some of the agony.

Sparks of green lightning from their fissured skin cast ominous shadows across the tall pillars, arcing from one finger to the next.

It’s intolerable, how weak they are. How incapable of basic function. They hope that the mysterious attacker will finish Szayel off on the roof and then come down here to end this debacle.

Something lands on the floor near them with a heavy thud. His body?

No. The equipment. Some of it, at least.

Ulquiorra has regained enough control of their body to peel their head off the ground and lift themself onto an elbow. Szayel lands with a soft grunt on both feet, frazzled but appearing unhurt.

“Cifer,” he hisses when he spots them. “Did you hit your head so spectacularly that you thought you merited a little nap? Are you aware something just tried to kill us?”

They narrow their eyes. “I can’t stand.”

“Oh, boo. And I suppose you’d like me to do something about it.”

If they’re going to be forced to hear him complain all the while, then no.

Ulquiorra’s left hip has popped outwards grotesquely, that leg flopped inoperably outwards. They can only sit up so much until they encounter a sharp, persistent pain flaring across their lower stomach. They mash the pad of their thumb into their shattered pelvis until they feel the muscles regenerate and then work around the bone, recreate the joint. Then they can force their hip back into place with a solid push, the same with their knee. They don’t make a sound.

Like piecing a model soldier back together.

It’s crude and primitive, but it works. Ulquiorra stands, shakes their legs to ensure everything is locked back into place.

“See,” Szayel chirps. “You could get so much done without that dour look on your face, moping around, ‘oh, Szayel Aporro, I can’t stand!’”

They look up through the hole in what’s now the ceiling to see if the mysterious being is following. Their eye lingers on the large craters they’d left on Aizen’s marble slab throne.

“It’s gone,” Szayel follows their gaze. “It took off rather quickly after your warning swat. One of Mayuri’s heinous creations? I couldn’t get a good look. Though — your reaction was quite interesting. I’ve never known statues to have particularly poor balance, hm, Bernini?” When they don’t deign an answer, he gestures to their arm. “Is it because of that?”

What isn’t because of _it?_

“The sensor.” Ulquiorra ignores his line of questioning entirely.

He sighs. “In working order. But I would urge against going back up. The next coordinates may be easier to reach if we can still access the halls.”

So be it.

Szayel follows them, bag in hand, behind the throne, where the wall opens sluggishly to a deep staircase. These halls may just be deep enough to still be mostly in tact, depending on where they needed to go. He knows the palace better in terms of numbers — they know it by blood splatter.

He goes first, then.

There’d once been strips of light illuminating each step and the perimeters of the walls, but now the stairs plunge into darkness. Szayel flips open the communicator from Mayuri, but it only goes so far in front of himself. He snorts whenever Ulquiorra’s boots catch his heel, until it’s decidedly not amusing, and he grabs their wrist to place their hand on his back. Like a leash. They’re used to that. They curl their fingers into the spare fabric bunched around his hip.

“Bash a Vasto Lorde’s head around for a bit, put it in a dark room, and it forgets how to use pesquisa,” Szayel mutters under his breath. No more than a whisper, but in the darkness it may as well be a revelational horn. “Some marvel of evolution.”

It was his idea.

The hallways are otherwise unremarkable. Even this far down into the bowels of the city, sand has accumulated in Ulquiorra’s hair and in the spaces between their fingers, coming in freely through the out of service vents. Szayel navigates to the last coordinates easily enough, only once having to backtrack from a dead end blocked by a smashed wall.

He finds a spiralling staircase that exits into one of the bright red landmark towers, and assembles the third sensor beneath the stone patio of a Privaron residence. Ulquiorra cannot help but watch the horizon.

They feel bruised — not on the knee or the forearm, but on the soul. Aizen’s throne was very… impactful.

“First,” Szayel carelessly tosses the equipment bag from Mayuri into the sand. He fishes out the communicator from a pocket, his fingers hovering over the buttons. “I need to tell you something. I analyzed the reiatsu of what attacked us. It had great similarity to that of Ishida Uryuu’s. The _Quincy,_ Ulquiorra. Now, this may be an oversight on Soul Society’s part. Perhaps this may have been the point all along — either to send us out here to be mauled, or to facilitate research on whatever _that_ was under the guise of this damn busy work.”

What’s his point?

“We can defect. We’re not very good at keeping promises, you and I.” Szayel twists his lips. The creases in his forehead are unbecoming. Ulquiorra wonders if he’ll ever end up looking like Barragan. “Or we can keep a secret. Which we are very good at.”

If Ulquiorra chooses not to come back, they will be hunted and killed sooner than they would be if they were to simply abide the rules of their imprisonment. It seems no better an option.

“Do you want to serve a two thousand year sentence?” they ask Szayel.

His nose scrunches up distastefully and he presses some keys on the communicator.

“Come on, then. Back into the lion’s den.” He opens a Garganta.

It empties the both of them into Mayuri’s laboratory, on a platform in the centre of an otherwise empty room. Several division members are standing around it, waiting, one scribbling in a pad. The third seat is waiting with a hand outstretched expectantly.

“Here to shake my hand? My, don’t I feel like a hero,” Szayel purrs when he’s descended the few steps from the platform. He holds one hand up, fingers loosely poised as though waiting for a bow and kiss as well.

Akon scowls. “Where’s the bag?”

“Your little horns are very endearing, which has prompted me to let go of how grievously you’ve offended me by caring more about a bag than properly greeting me.”

“Are you telling me you lost it?” He rubs the centre of his forehead, exasperated. “You know — forget it. Our expense reports are already a mess.”

“A perfect being, losing track of a simple bag… can I trust that you lost it _after_ you dealt with its contents?” Mayuri drawls. His figure blocks the glaring brightness from the doorway he stands in. The girl attached to his hip shadows him not far behind.

Szayel tenses beside Ulquiorra, his reiatsu turning jagged and thick. Such an untempered reaction. “Any _decent_ scientist would already know that the everything has been assembled in perfect condition, considering that the nature of transmitters is to _transmit._ Do you need help reading the data? You need only ask.”

Mayuri’s lip curls up over his flat, broad teeth. It’s difficult to tell whether this is a grimace or a smile. He’s approaching Ulquiorra with the bracelet again when Szayel waves a hand.

“Cifer had a bit of a tumble.” Szayel says. “They seemed overcome with something and fell off a roof, as though they couldn’t move.” He shares a glance with them. “Completely unprompted, as well. Of course, being too stubbornly mute to tell you this themself, this is all I observed.”

“Another fit?” Mayuri strokes his one long nail down the length of Ulquiorra’s feathered arm. “Describe it for me.”

Ulquiorra levels him with a long stare. “Painful.” No shit.

“I looked into the matter. Your… remaining parts are most likely due to shock that occurred when your regenerative abilities had to work quicker than usual to keep you alive — it was confused about which body to heal. Your fits, at least, are caused by the reiatsu imbalance between your arrancar and resurrección forms.” He clasps the device back around their wrist without any more probing. “Keep this on and it won't happen again.”

It's not so much that Ulquiorra doesn't want to experience the searing pain of their reactions ever again -- but that they want to vanquish it. They don't want to hide behind Mayuri’s questionable contraptions. They want to overcome it. Pain is only a side effect of success, it is earned no other way but through sacrifice.

Their helplessness infuriates them. The fact that they’ve ruined themself so thoroughly and so knowingly weighs heavier on their soul than any misdemeanour.

Szayel and Ulquiorra are escorted back to the estate by a Detention Unit squad, now late into the night. They can just only barely sense a strong bakudō seal around the group — it must be concealing the obvious hollow reiatsu. A sort of mirror trick, they devise, reflecting back only the images of the Shinigami.

Ulquiorra invites themself to Szayel’s room for the first time when they’ve arrived.

He welcomes them into his mess with a shrug. There are stacks of papers and scrolls and handmade maps scattered over desks, bureaus, even the bed mats.

“I’ve been attempting to transcribe as many of my notes from memory as possible,” he chatters quickly, parsing over a few spare sheets of paper. After so long of this lethargy, he seems excited to be doing something with his mind again. “But first and foremost,” he grabs at Ulquiorra’s wristlet. “I’d like to take a look at this.”

“A reiatsu suppressant,” they provide. He freezes. Draws their right wrist closer, folding back a feather to better inspect the device.

“This is my design!” They’d rather not ask how he knows, lest they be subjected to a tirade about that as well. Blindly, he grasps behind himself for a tiny metal pick. His madness is resourceful. “Let me see the inside.”

But Ulquiorra pulls away. They remember what Mayuri had said the first time he put it on — about it malfunctioning, about rushing its construction. Finding out what sort of traps are hidden inside the device while it’s still on their person does not appeal to them.

“Mayuri must have pillaged my laboratory — I should have expected no less!” Szayel reaches out again, Ulquiorra steps back.

“No failsafe?”

“What fucking _failsafe_? Do you mean, did I account for some boneheaded cannibal trying to copulate with my equipment? No, apparently, I did not. I cannot say that was at the top of any list.” A frustrated huff. “Fine. Who knows what he’s done to defile my projects — the thought makes me dizzy. I’ll only have to return the favour to him one day.”

 

* * *

 

In Szayel Aporro’s room, there is a long mirror.

By how often he permits himself to preen in it, it must have been a deliberate design choice. The problem is not his vanity, but rather that which the mirror presents to Ulquiorra: they are tempted to see themself.

“What issue is it?” Szayel mutters from behind his hand, a barely concealed yawn. He flips a page in a book he’s been touting as boring and _full of shit_ for the better half of the day, but he is equally as determined to see it to its end. “You’ve been staring. Look into it. Maybe you’ll shatter it and we’ll have one less problem.”

He kicks his legs up on a stout table that’s been only minimally cleared of his work, crosses his ankles, flips a page. Flips another page. A disgruntled noise, a snobbish _tsk_.

Curiosity strangles the cat.

Ulquiorra creeps closer and closer into the frame of the mirror.

It had never been a lack of… self-esteem, as he has attempted to credit it. The concept of beauty or of cosmetic virtue was never so important, nor known to them. It was more of the paradox of their being — the conundrum they faced when they are so null of feeling, and yet boast those streaks of gangrenous tears down their cheeks. It was worthy of igniting a certain fury, a certain visceral response to witnessing something so incorrect. It felt a curse, sometimes, to not have an answer for why they possess this mark of Cain.

So Ulquiorra looks.

They are small. They look frail, a lacklustre skin stretched too thin over them, all awkward and haphazardly arranged into a functioning but dull body — an inky, dead number rises higher off their bones than their near-translucent skin. One finger skims the ledge of their hipbone, where it connects into the crease of their pelvis, then back up to the edge of their hollow hole. Their thick, unruly hair. Their face. The tears are still there: the right eye corrupted by Murciélago, tinged yellow and the mark flowing from it thick and triangular.

But that is all. The deed is done.

Ulquiorra is endowed with no deeper thought concerning their form. It exists. It is acknowledged as existing.

They had not noticed when Szayel stopped flipping his book, but in the background reflection of the mirror, it is face-down on the table, and he is standing close behind them, warm and tall. His hands conform to the slope of their waist as though his palms were moulded for that exact purpose, thumbs scoring into the deep rift beneath Ulquiorra’s last ribs.

“Was it so bad?”

What did it matter?

They are of an evil essence, through and through. They have only adapted to see it more clearly now. Unnatural, but selected for success, to appraise nothing more than the immortal nature of iniquity, subterfuge, and villainy.

Ulquiorra doesn’t know why they’ve been so spineless, then, concerning their own corruption.

They must accept Murciélago — boon or blight. It doesn’t matter which. They’re attached to it regardless. They are meant for things greater than mourning their bastardization.

 

* * *

 

Ulquiorra asks for as much the next time Shunsui visits.

“Somewhere to train, eh?” He scratches thoughtfully at the stubble on his chin. “I don’t know about that one, Ulquiorra-san. There’s a few old ones around the barracks, but actually walking you through a Division in broad daylight is… a logistical nightmare.”

Szayel gives an exasperated sigh. “It only stands to reason that if you could suppress a reiatsu, you could also camouflage it. Give me access to a laboratory. I’ll make something.”

“First somewhere to train, now a lab?” Shunsui waves his raised hands in protest. “You’re both asking a bit too much of me.

The Shinigami train for hundreds of years before they can even imagine their first battle. Ulquiorra was born wielding a weapon. What are they supposed to do when they can't anymore?

“Do you want me to be useful, or do you want just the illusion of it?” Ulquiorra says.

Shunsui’s brow furrows. “I… could get an escort on stand-by for you, but Mayuri will take some hard convincing to let you take that thing off, especially with how we rushed him in the first place.”

“Beg on your knees,” Szayel sneers. “I hear he likes that sort of thing.”

 

* * *

 

It doesn’t take much convincing, apparently, by how readily Mayuri strolls into the estate several days later.

He’s not pleased about it, clearly, but he drops a pile of simple black fabric onto a bureau. A twirl of his finger summons his blank faced attendant to undo Ulquiorra’s wristlet. She seems to purposefully arrange herself so that her back faces Szayel, and so that she doesn’t touch Ulquiorra whatsoever.

Mayuri sighs when he receives the bracelet, clicking it closed. “You’re a nightmare,” he says more to Szayel than Ulquiorra, or them both.

Szayel puts one hand on his hip, cocks it out. “Are you dreaming about me, now? How inappropriate. Do I haunt you?”

A scoff. “I would sooner peel you open and see how close to your heart I got. Maybe I could find out how you managed to weasel your way out of death.”

"You're not getting your hands on me." Szayel lunges forward, grabbing the front of Mayuri's haori. “Cut the shit. I know you've been through my laboratory. We both know what was in there. Give me whatever you salvaged of my research. You have no use for it. Half of my notes are encrypted to begin with."

"I think not." Mayuri looks down at Szayel's clenched hand disdainfully, peeling his fingers away with the blunt end of a pen. “I’ve had nine very productive months. You’re not nearly as clever as you think you are. Don’t make me restrain you, too.”

Szayel withers, though the space between his eyebrows is pinched and his shoulders tensed in a way that gives the impression he’s one light breeze away from snapping.

“Anyways,” Mayuri waves dismissively. The girl unfolds the black fabric to reveal two cloaks. “I’m happy to get rid of these. I have no use for this particular owner’s work gathering dust in my laboratory. The kidō woven into it will mask your reiatsu and render you invisible to the untrained eye. There’s space for you in the Eighth Division’s old training hall. Make it worth some while.”

Ulquiorra does so, for their own worthiness. They start their regimen after Mayuri leaves — every evening when most Shinigami have had enough time to shuffle away from work, to lessen any chance of being discovered, they go to the training hall.

Szayel had come with them one of the first times to do nothing more than complain about how difficult swordsmanship was, then tasked himself with helping Ulquiorra stretch out their hips and legs for no reason but to grope them as much as he could.

So what if he’d fucked them right there on the floor? It was abandoned, after all, and if they so happened to forget about the Detention Unit’s watchful eye? What they don’t know doesn’t harm them. At least after the fourth time, Ulquiorra managed to steel themself again Szayel’s distractions.

Ulquiorra narrows down the source of their attacks to things that exert reiatsu: their cero, their bala, the outpouring that Mayuri had forced out of them. So they start by attempting to leak reiatsu out through their fingertips, their hands, rippling over their arms and across their back. Small, hesitant, and testing.

Some triumph.

And some reactions are worse than others. Most become easier, the more they force themself through it.

But they do not think they will ever fully recover from Murciélago’s affliction.

This is confirmed when, after a streak of success, the reaction is so profound that it brings them back to their elbows and knees in the middle of the training hall, every muscle lit up and quivering, their face pressed into their forearm.

_Kill me_ , they plead to themself. To the impassive, stone faced god that wielded a part of their soul for its own diversions. They would rather not live in shame of failure and corruption, not know all that was said and thought by Aizen for it.

“Ulquiorra?” Szayel. He must have just walked in. At the minimum, they have the level of consciousness to be able to tell.

Ulquiorra wishes that Szayel would take pity on them and drive their sword through their skull. It feels too heavy, too full, too swimming with heat. What would it take for their spirit to find some other, unmarred body and crawl into it? Something already warm, so that the contrast of their explosive, self-damaging reiatsu was not so jarring.

They think that Szayel is attempting to touch them, but all it feels like is searing flame licking up around their shoulders and back, the tremor rattling their whole body and forcing a gasp from them.

It seems impossible that they should feel hot and cold, tight and slack limbed all at the same time.

It fades.

Life is made more unbearable by the fact that it is not constant agony.

Ulquiorra goes from elbow to palm, rubbing the damp bridge of their nose on their straightened shoulder.

“Again?” Szayel asks, kneeling beside them.

_Kill me_ , they want to implore him. _Kill me next time._

It’s pathetic.

Yes. Again.

And when it comes again, they will not be so weak.

It turns out Ulquiorra doesn’t need long to redeem themself: someone is following them from the training hall the next night. Different from the Detention Unit — a calm, observant sensation that trails them from respectable distances. That’s been replaced by five reiatsus poised on the edge of anticipation for Ulquiorra’s next move. If they continue walking through the Eighth Division too quickly or too slowly, they reckon their head will end up in the sewer.

The message of their wanderings must not have reached all ears. They’ve been spotted, even with the cloak, and it’s too late to do much of anything else.

So they make a sharp turn into an alley between two darkened buildings, yanking off the cloak as they go, leaving it to fall onto the paved road. Getting dragged to their death by the hem of it would be an anticlimactic end.

An arm slips around beneath Ulquiorra’s jaw. They’re fast enough bite down on the hand that comes up to cup their mouth, and slam their head back until they feel something crunch. Their captor is stubborn, strong, and doesn’t let go when a second person lands in front, so Ulquiorra uses the solid weight behind them and the grip around their throat to kick their leg up.

One, two, three hits, but their ankle is caught on the fourth like they’re made of nothing more than bird bones. They reach back and up, trying to jam their nails and claws into the first assailant’s eyes. It’s enough. The grip weakens, and falls away, but so does Ulquiorra— their upper body cracks onto the ground, now half suspended by their ankle.

The third reiatsu joins to deliver a flurry of punches to their abdomen and chest, their face protected only by their crossed arms. Their other leg comes up with a sharp knee to anything it hits first, knocking this smaller figure off them.

Using the hold around their ankle, they haul themself up off the ground with sonído, their free foot finding friction in the air, and then on the flat of the Shinigami’s face. Well, now flat. Featureless and oozing red from every shattered bone, where it shows through a full black uniform.

Ulquiorra manages only a short glimpse before the third Shinigami is standing up, shaking off some dust and a shoulder that looks grotesquely dislocated. They’re engaged in a quick fire fist fight, catching blows in their palms and ducking to evade kicks, the hardest of which fall into the crooks of their arms. 

They see no better opportunity to try: they open the figurative dam on their reiatsu, let it sputter at the tips of their fingers and rush into the fissures across their skin, like their whole body is gathering cero. The next punch lands onto a flat, dense shield of reiatsu they’ve gathered over their left forearm — it tapers over their fingertips into a sharp blade, crackling with the concentration of energy.

Murciélago is feeling gracious tonight. It’d be best not to waste her mercy. They’re not sure how long it’ll last.

Ulquiorra splits the attacker’s throat with the blade before there’s any chance for recoil. They immediately ground one foot on their step forward, whipping around to let the reiatsu discharge into the last two Shinigami who were charging them at the same time.

The entrance of the alley clears to one lone figure.

They thought they only counted five — but indeed, this is a new addition.

Too late.

Captain Suì-Fēng is pointing her short blade up at their face.

“How did you escape prison?” She wastes no time.

“I walked.”

Ulquiorra can hear her teeth squeaking and mashing together. Her blade skims the delicate skin of their throat. “Who let you walk?”

Bureaucracy does Soul Society no favours, if basic information regarding prisoners of their caliber can go overlooked.

“Shunsui.”

Suì-Fēng turns still as stone. They think for a moment this revelation has immediately killed her where she stands. “You were _released?_ This was sanctioned?” She doesn’t wait for an answer before shoving their abandoned cloak into their chest. “Come with me. As a Captain of the Thirteen Court Guards, I am exercising my authority to place you under arrest.”

Oh, again?

 

* * *

 

Ulquiorra watches dawn break from the inside of an empty, kidō sealed room in the Second Division.

At least the scenery is varied this time.

Suì-Fēng joined them not too long ago, her clothing and hair all neatly pressed despite the early hour. She watches them dutifully with a deep scowl, as though her tongue is tied into all the possible ways she could hurl insults and curses at them.

Eventually, Shunsui saunters into the room, looking her complete opposite with his sleep-soft eyes and ruffled hair, the ties on his robes off centre and perhaps missing one sandal altogether.

“There doesn’t seem to be a fire anywhere around here,” he mumbles around a yawn.

“Sober yourself,” Suì-Fēng snaps. “You’re a disgrace. If you can barely crawl out of your bed to carry out your duties, I don’t know how you can be trusted to deal with _that_ ,” she violently, precisely jabs to point at Ulquiorra.

Shunsui follows the sturdy line of her arm. He immediately shakes off his bleary coat of sleep when she sees them.

“Damn.”

“I know about the other one too. You’re making yourself a fine collection of Soul Society’s enemies, Shunsui.”

He smoothes his unruly hairline back, a meagre attempt at cleaning himself up. “I think you’re trying to imply something. At this hour? You might as well make yourself clear, Captain.”

“How does treason, collusion, and terrorism sound?”

“Very bad! It would be a shame for any of those things to happen.”

“Don’t test me!” Suì-Fēng stomps her foot down, raising a layer of dust from the floorboards. It’s commanding, rather than girlish. “You should be weeping with thanksgiving that I’ve waited until morning to throw you in front of the Central 46!”

“A little rash,” Shunsui smiles mirthlessly. “Considering Yama-Jii has already approved I _deal with_ that. _That’s_ name is Ulquiorra, by the way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ask him yourself.”

“I will.”

“Right now?”

“Right now.” Suì-Fēng reaches to slide open the door, looking hesitant about leaving Shunsui with Ulquiorra in the heart of her Division — but most likely remembers exactly what her Division is good for, and leaves.

Shunsui finally releases a long, shaky breath. “So, back to this,” his weak attempt at humour. “Are you alright?”

Ulquiorra was nearly murdered and imprisoned within the span of ten minutes. How are they supposed to be faring?

“Bad question.” He’s learning. “I’m sorry, Ulquiorra. Szayel is, for all I know, still at the estate. We’ll see for how long.”

Szayel isn’t someone who allows himself to be forgotten for longer than the few hours he’s already been left alone. Even if he has enough wit to sense the oddity in routine and stay quiet, he’ll be heard screeching as he’s dragged to his own imprisonment soon enough.

The morning wanes into early afternoon. They expect to see towers and barracks falling in the wake of Suì-Fēng’s rage, but all that happens when she reenters is a breezy swoosh of the paper doors.

“Did you have some tea with the Captain Commander? I think today was the first of the month.”

“Shut up,” she says cooly and quietly, smoothing down her white haori. “I refuse to be taunted by someone I perceive as a traitor.”

Shunsui sighs. “It’s not exactly a democracy, Suì-Fēng.”

“It’s amoral! It’s unprincipled to not consult every Captain before a decision as dangerous and stupid as thing one is made!”

“Maybe so.” He shrugs. “But it was practical for the situation we’re in.”

“No,” she hisses. “We’re not at war. You did this at a time of peace. It's one thing to plan for the future, and another to disrupt the balance of that future. This what I'd expect during our last stand, in a moment of desperation. Not walking through the streets of our own barracks.

“You hold the opinion that you’re the only Captain who thinks of the greater good for Seireitei, but you tend to this ego in all the wrong ways. Whether or not the Captain Commander approved this, only through your wily charm no doubt, doesn’t change the fact that I think it’s wrong.”

“That’s fine,” says Shunsui. “But another fact remains — that the arrancar are under my care. I’ll be returning Ulquiorra to their residence now.”

“No,” Suì-Fēng motions to an invisible eye, and the doors open. “No. The Captain Commander and I both agreed that you’ve given the arrancar too much freedom — and that _bribing_ the leader of my Detention Unit in order to escape accountability to the rest of the Captains was wildly inappropriate. Both will be staying under my supervision. Feel free to visit your friends whenever you’d like.”

Szayel is marched in, tight lipped and obviously fuming, his wrists crossed and restrained behind his back. “What was that I said about trusting Shinigami?” He all but snarls at Shunsui.

A worthless specimen, he’d once lamented to Ulquiorra. He wished for all other life to be eradicated by Aizen’s hand.

Was it all for show? Or had he still been under the euphoric stupor of godship and sainthood?

“I’ll fix this,” Shunsui affirms as he’s being whisked away on Suì-Fēng’s coattails. “You can trust me.”

Szayel sees him out with trilling, mocking laughter.

A pair of guards release Szayel’s kidō bindings, but stay in the room, dutifully standing on each side of the mobile paper screens.

He throws himself to the opposite wall where Ulquiorra stands, slouched up against it without any of his usual decadence and poise.

“I suppose I have you to thank for all this,” he mutters to them. “You can’t do anything right, can you? Just keep everything neat and orderly?”

Apparently not.

Neither Ulquiorra nor Szayel sleep that night. Eventually, the two of them slide down to sit beside one another, but otherwise fully awake to watch each changing of the guards. Some of his rage dissipates, his tense shoulders lowering from his ears and his legs splayed out lazily, defeatedly.

Shunsui invites himself in meekly that morning, looking decidedly less disheveled. “Oh, good, you’re still here,” he smiles.

“Quiet,” Szayel raises a hand. The atmosphere chills. He stands up, dusts off the backs of his thighs. “I’ve had enough of this passivity concerning my life. I am not including Cifer in the following. They can do whatever they’d like, even if it includes rotting here because they have some twisted devotion to pseudo-nihilism.

As long as I remain here, I will not speak to Mayuri. He may have had some results with decrypting my notes thus far, but I guarantee he will run into trouble sooner or later. Especially with my latest work — something we can both cede to calling my most… advantageous work. I am prepared, if only a bit unpleased, to surrender any information about my research _and_ Aizen.

Look at it this way: I’m not the one who was actively swinging a sword in the middle of the Eighth Division, and I _am_ the one who already successfully completed an assignment for Seireitei, am I not?”

“You are,” Shunsui nods warily. “But I am trying to get both of you out.”

“Don’t.” Szayel glares down at Ulquiorra, his nose crinkling. “Leave them. Until they can say they want something for their life besides taking it all sitting. I’m sure you’ll meet no objection with Suì-Fēng.”

So, he’s turned against them now?

It’s not as if they wouldn’t do the same, take the same opportunities.

If they cared enough.

Ulquiorra is a prisoner regardless of where they’re placed, or how far to each direction the bars go. If Szayel is so easily enchanted and forgetful of his position, then it’s his flag to bear. They don’t need to join him in thinking they’ve some rights, some entitlement to comfort.

An order comes directly from the Captain Commander to relocate Szayel back to the estate the next evening. Suì-Fēng can argue only so much with this, but her crusade is most likely not yet suppressed.

Ulquiorra expects revolution in the barracks should she be denied her prize again.

 

* * *

 

Ulquiorra finds themself waiting, more than yielding to their sentence.

For what?

 

* * *

 

Szayel makes a point to visit frequently, running his mouth about the state of life outside their four walls, chittering and chattering about Mayuri’s ugliest habits. It’s only been a few days, but he narrates a novel for each hour he breathes fresh air, walks on grass, reclines in a bed.

He makes a point to show how little he needs or thinks of them.

“I’m perfectly content on leaving you here for however many hundreds of years it’ll take for you to admit you _want_ something,” he says once, kneeling in front of them, his chin in his palm. “Of course, you’ll also need to acknowledge how brilliantly cunning and capable I am. To be safe, you could also mention how lovely I look. On any given day, as this is, naturally, a constant fact. How about today? I curled my hair special for you.”

When they don’t answer, he shrugs and clasps his hands definitively, standing to leave.

Ulquiorra resists the urge to roll their eyes. “You’ll get me when you need a fuck.”

He pauses, a nettled tilt to his head and his lips. “Me? Despite your unwillingness to say so, my beauty is on the level of _angels._ I’ll find someone to replace you. Unfortunately for you, your monstrous right arm doesn’t count as another person when you get yourself off in your prison cell.” Szayel wiggles his fingers in a half-hearted wave. “Sleep well, darling!”

 

* * *

 

Well? What _do_ they want?

First and foremost, they want to hold Szayel’s face beneath water if it means removing that sardonic grin off his face.

“Oh, you see that one?” Szayel says to Shunsui. “That face is asking ‘why am I in here but Szayel Aporro gets to be out there?’ Their thought processes are evolving. The answer, darling, is because _you_ are a liability, and _I’m_ an asset.”

Szayel sighs and holds out a thin stack of black clothing. "A change of clothes." Ulquiorra only then looks down to see that they're speckled with blood and all manner of viscera from that night’s altercation. The hair at the back of their head is crunchy and matted.

As they reach out, he withdraws, backs away a few steps.

"Ah-ah," Szayel tuts. "Where are your manners?"

Ulquiorra isn't in the mood for this. When they move to walk towards him, the fabric fizzles away into a cloud of ash under the gathered heat of an unfired cero. This is where they must draw the line. They’ve had enough.

They’re on Szayel before his fiendish smile can even begin to take shape; their hand fisted and twisted into the fabric around his throat, his back to the wall, and his miscalculation abundantly obvious. His feet slide helplessly to right himself, struggling with their iron grip forcing him to their eye level.

“Who do you think you are?” Ulquiorra snarls, their teeth bared. They can almost feel the frantic pounding of his jugular on their tongue. “You’re a rat who can barely hold your zanpakutō straight. You’re in no position to be making demands of me, Octava. What a farce that is. The only reason you ever returned to the Espada was because you’re a marginally better punching bag than Aaroniero. You should have been muzzled and thrown into a ravine.”

Szayel opens his mouth, but the only noise that comes out when they crush his collar harder is a croak.

Something moves in the edges of Ulquiorra’s vision — one of the guards flashing towards them. They’ve only a moment to register this before he shouts an incantation, thrusts the heel of his palm into their temple, a burning light bursting around them.

Ulquiorra’s head splinters against the wooden floor, consciousness following suit.

 

* * *

 

They’re standing in a grave of water. It laps at their knees and ripples around the stalks of short quartz branches growing up from the smooth bedrock beneath. It has no temperature, no sensation, no characteristic besides being dark. The only reason they know it’s there is because they’re looking at it.

Aizen is here.

He’s crossing a few feet of space between him and Ulquiorra with a wistful smile, though the rest of his face is unreadable beyond not matching the smile. Dead behind the eyes. He has their eyes.

His voice lingers in the cracks between the stones of the earth, and his reiatsu lodges itself in Ulquiorra’s throat. Aizen exudes disappointment at their current station, and how easily they’ve traded themself to a new master. Indeed, Ulquiorra’s leash is long but easy to yank in any direction.

Their legs go weak, forcing them down to their knees before him. What changed, that they now need to be coerced into doing this?

He pushes them down backwards into the water, their body buckling beneath the two fingers he poises against their collarbone. He need not use much pressure; they’re more tightly packed sand than corporeal.

Ulquiorra’s hair floats on the surface of the black water, denser than they know it to be, the back of their skull gently cradled in it. Their hands are taken by a current with no origin, drifting off to the side.

Everything else happens quickly.

Aizen’s weight lands on Ulquiorra’s hips, sinking their body down into the viscous water, driving the spires of a quartz branch up through their stomach. He yanks their wrists, impales both palms similarly. With one hand he cups their forehead, and with the other he crumples their throat, keeps their face underwater.

Ulquiorra’s mouth fills with water, burns through their nose when they can’t breathe or swallow any more, bubbles of it sticking to their eyelashes.

He’s not stopping.

It would be just as easy do nothing at all as it would be to kick their legs up and throw Aizen off or rip their hands off their cross and strike him.

What are they going to do?

They’re going to die.

So what are they going to do?

* * *

 

Ulquiorra opens their eyes.

Closes. Opens, halfway. It’s all they can handle. Everything is waterlogged and hazy, static at the corners.

Nothing hurts, really. They just don’t think they currently occupy their whole body.

“— You know you don’t _really_ have the kind of authority to decide their freedom or not.” Shunsui’s voice behind them. “Captain Suì-Fēng’s just hard to crack.”

Szayel huffs. “I need not be reminded. Her squeaking still has me waking up at night in sweats.”

A stifled laugh. “So, I didn’t think that rank would be important to arrancar.”

“There is a certain incentive to not starting fights when you know who’s stronger than you. Not having your skull smashed in is quite the luxury in Las Noches. You see, Shunsui-san, I’m alive because I’m intelligent. Though it may be all I have… and I may have misjudged these circumstances, it permeates every action of mine, every ne’er do good deed of mine. This is where my dread associates have failed, and dropped like flies.”

“And Ulquiorra?”

What did Ulquiorra do? What did they let Aizen do to them?

“What can I say? Pests know how to maneuver the sewers they live in. No — I have no answer. They are an anomaly. They always have been. I trust this is their unchanging nature: to be intriguing, but to be as shallow as the sepulchre they crawled out from.”

What stand did they take against Aizen?

Shunsui cannot help but snicker, a taunting sound. “Now, that’s not very nice to Ulquiorra-san, to say things like that when they’re not even conscious to defend themself.”

Did he leave them to defend Las Noches against Kurosaki, knowing full well they would die? Were they only meant to coax out the next level of ability in him?

Did Aizen kill them?

“As if they would bother saying anything in their own defence. I’ve known them for too long to be anything but scathing in my reviews. Anything less and one might get the wrong idea about our relationship.”

“And your relationship is — ?”

A long pause, a long breath out.

Ulquiorra’s temple is pounding, their brain feeling like it’s floating in thick gel, but there’s no blood smeared across the floor. Their vision has stabilized.

“I loathe to admit I’ve not answers for everything mysterious in this universe.”

Ulquiorra isn’t sure why he would answer in such a way. It was a simple enough question with a simple enough response. They realize they don’t know very much about him at all.

After a moment of contemplative silence, Shunsui asks, “Say, do you think it was a good idea to provoke them that much?” The timbre of his voice makes them think he’s leaned in closer, above them.

“I… was unaware they had any capacity for this type of reaction,” Szayel admits under his breath. “Are you _trying_ to wake a tranquilized lion?”

Ulquiorra props themself up onto their elbows, then their palms, their hair a sweeping curtain between the harsh light and the sullen hush of Szayel and Shunsui.

Eventually they ask, “Would it make a difference if I wanted to leave?”

Shunsui’s jaw makes a clicking noise, like he’s opened his mouth and immediately snapped it shut. “It would help. I can spin something that you’re cooperative and eager to help.” He pauses. Quieter now: “I still believe in you, Ulquiorra.”

That doesn’t mean anything to them. They don’t know why he thinks it should.

He is a soft man with a heart so equally soft it would feel as mush between their fingers, spoiled sinew that’s already been mashed by a buzzard’s talons.

“Then I want to be free,” they say.


	4. BAIT AND BLEED

Ulquiorra doesn’t make mistakes.

They don’t make miscalculations either.

Whatever gets the best of them is a matter of divine intervention to which they have no audience to, nor accountable blame for.

“— Did it feel good? To have me beneath your fist like that? At your mercy?” Szayel is taunting them.

He hasn’t ceased berating and challenging them since they were released into the estate, which now sits beneath a mandatory kidō barrier. Did he forget so soon, their proximity to bending his trachea into a ninety-degree angle?

“You went through _all_ that just because, what, you couldn’t admit the fact that I’m lovely, fair, and perfectly competent at handling my own life?”

This is, however, the one time Ulquiorra will entertain the idea of misjudging a situation. Perhaps they should have remained in Suì-Fēng’s prison, if it meant escaping this endless, more trying wrath.

A distinctly familiar thought. Is Ulquiorra entirely sure that the past months in Seireitei were real at all? Is their purgatory nothing more than thirteen cycles of each Captain discovering and imprisoning them? If so, hopefully the last one will end with throwing them into a pit of fire, or something else as equally all-consuming.

“You only managed your way into freedom because of those pathetic teary eyes you gave Shunsui — after getting thrown on your flat ass by some unpracticed Shinigami, might I add. And in the middle of some tirade about how _I’m_ nothing but a punching bag!”

Ulquiorra’s almost surprised that his face isn’t purple with how much air he’s losing. No, he could keep going. They know. They’d like to not set a new record.

They watch their fingers dance tying a final knot on their clean clothes in the mirror, identical to the last save for a deep slit from underarm to hip. It’s an odd sensation, to think the edges of one’s body have gaps and all of the innards are about to flow away like watery ink. There is still distance between the mind, the reality, and the reflection of that reality — twice divorced from the true substance.

Their hair has gotten long over their shoulders. Ulquiorra ties it up, a messy whorl around their horn.

“Back to being mute. That’s terrific.” Szayel’s body contorts in and out of tension, as though trying to forcefully, physically drop the subject. “I’m assuming the sun has long set on me receiving any manner of flattery or apologies from you.”

He deserved it. Besides, Ulquiorra's mouth is a steel-jaw trap that could not even fathom the shape of the words he asks for.

“Mmh.” He leans his head into his palm with Atlassian weight. “It’s not as if I think very highly of you, either. This is just the way it’ll have to be.”

That’s the way it goes.

Data is gathered, bodies in Las Noches grow in piles so great that mountains are terraformed out of the bones, and shadows seem to become sentient. That last one may only be due to the fact that Ulquiorra hasn’t slept in over a year. They think Szayel has begun slyly taking notes on their condition.

Does it include paranoia?

Every time their blink is too long, the darkness shapes itself into Aizen’s liquid smile.

The gaps between missions to Hueco Mundo increase, until there is hardly anything to boast in terms of returns. The world seems like whatever force holds it together is attempting to balance it in full hands, watching it tilt near-spilling but not doing much to stop it. Whatever stain comes out of the mess is none of Ulquiorra’s concern.

So they’re obliged to think.

One night, Ulquiorra’s problems multiply in both quantity and consequence.

Shunsui breaks the kidō barrier. When he enters the main room, his brow hanging low over his dark eyes and his mouth a severe line, and he says, “I’m not going to keep you long. I frankly don’t have the time myself — all you need to know right now is that the Quincy have declared war.”

There is a look of mania in his eyes. Wild, distressed, undone at the seams like Ulquiorra has never seen him before.

Szayel is already at attention. “We’ve not exactly been met with warm reception here, if you’re asking us to fight alongside you in broad daylight.”

“No,” Shunsui shakes his head. It does nothing to tilt the weight of a crown he bears. “We’ve concluded that the massive numbers of dead hollow have been caused by the Quincy. This is, as you can imagine, a problem for the balance of souls. I’m asking you two to deal with it at the source — directly.”

Lethally.

“Someone from the Twelfth Division will be here shortly to supervise your leave.” Shunsui hesitates a moment when he’s near leaving, absently rubbing a spare thread off his haori between his thumb and forefinger. “I hope to see you again.”

Neither Ulquiorra nor Szayel move for several long seconds.

“Am I the only one who can see something wrong with this situation?” Szayel mutters, attempting to keep his words careful, but his hysteria has already has gotten a sprinting start.

No. But he’s going to explain himself anyways, and Ulquiorra is going to have to listen.

“Oh, _no,_ ” he whines, cupping his hand over his eyes and forehead as if faint. He may actually be. “Oh, shit. Shit! Don’t you get it!? We _saw_ a Quincy in Hueco Mundo — and we chose to walk right back into our adversary’s chains like a pair of lemmings, without saying anything! Hah! I wonder what sort of conspiracy charge we’ll be indicted with now. All a formality, of course. Do you think the Shinigami will resurrect that wonderful execution hill of theirs just for us?”

Szayel has started to pace the main room, throwing his hands around in lieu of punctuation.

Not entirely irrational. The hearts of humans are easily swayed, easily slighted, and quick to misunderstanding. It’s not so much of a personality flaw as it is an ingrained nature. Dealing with it requires a lesson in finesse… the kind that Ulquiorra doesn’t heed. They’d rather shatter it than abide by it.

“Or!” Szayel stops in front of them, waggling his fingers to frame his next point. “If the Shinigami don’t already know about that scheme of ours, the Quincy will say something about it! I can hear it now, ‘why, aren’t those some lovely arrancar you’ve got there, Shinigami-sans, isn’t it curious that we met each other before? Who knows if this war would happen if something had been done about that?’ We’re done, Cifer. Finished. Have you any last words as we head right into our demise?”

“If they find out,” Ulquiorra says, “we kill them all.”

“Amazing.” Szayel sneers. “You’ve somehow managed to find the exact combination of eight words that would throw me into an even deeper pit of despair.”

After this, he goes sullenly quiet until the Shinigami arrives to see them both off. Surely, he hasn’t sprouted a fabled conscience and begun to imagine the consequences of war. He doesn’t need to imagine. Ulquiorra is complaining about this only insofar that it’s different, and they don’t know the cause or reason for it. They think that if everyone paraded one’s prerogatives like the brandishing of a flag, it would eliminate the dawdle between confrontations. They could easier berate or ignore Szayel if he would tell them which one to do.

“Ulquiorra,” Szayel says after some walking through the Garganta’s caverns. It’s slow moving through the reishi torrents. He’s behind them by a few steps, only able to drag his feet so quickly.

“Cifer.” Again, when they don’t stop. They assumed he would keep talking as he usually might, their response be damned. But this is the name he uses when he’s in a particular mood, and so they stop to look back at him, wispy trails of reishi tangling around their ankles.

“I’ve something to tell you. Listen carefully to this, if nothing else.” His face is drawn with a certain seriousness, and one of his hands comes to clasp tightly around the back of their neck. "Gabriel. The fact of the matter is -- I can't control who it chooses I be reborn from. It’s feature blind, its only qualification having physical contact with me. Were I to die again, make sure you're far away. Even before. Before it picks. Do you understand? Leave me to die, if it means adequate distance between us when it happens."

Ulquiorra understands what he wants them to do, but not why. He seems troubled by the fact he may potentially rip out of their body to see another day.

"I understand,” they acquiesce, because they know better than to ask him to reveal his true intentions.

He squeezes their shoulder and continues down the sluggish path.

The only sound that inhabits Hueco Mundo is the haunting creaks of Hell’s gates. Not even the wind dares blister the sandwastes. On the horizon, a strange blue fire twisting into spires and funnels and then spreading across the dunes, broken only either by crystal trees or spinal columns. Which is which, another question entirely.

Those with some vestiges of luck still have corpses to name.

Ulquiorra has seen what becomes of hollow when killed by Quincy.

That is to say, nothing becomes, and nothing remains.

These Quincy must either be particularly brave (stupid?), or evolved greatly beyond their means to deal this type of devastation to armies of arrancar. Ulquiorra remembers Ishida’s arrows as being pathetic little pinpricks.

Something not to tell Szayel about. He would bitch until his jaw splintered, pierced a vein in his skull, and then continue to argue until he choked on his own blood.

After some time of aimlessly walking side-by-side, Szayel says, “How tall is your tower?”

“Six hundred metres,” they reply.

“Hm.” He squints at the horizon. “If even half of it is still standing, it may serve as a good vantage point.”

“To see what?”

Szayel laughs and throws his hands up, exasperated. “A marvellous question. I doubt even the Shinigami who tasked us with this drudgery know. It’s a bit curious isn’t it? The brunt of the Quincy will surely be redirected to fight in the, you know, _war_ they declared on Soul Society. The damage has already been done here, or at the very least paused until after all balance in the universe is sufficiently obliterated.”

“Would it be so unacceptable?”

“Would what be?”

“A lack of balance.”

“Are you asking for my professional opinion?”

Ulquiorra steps over a fallen column, their heel sticking in the slackened maw of a lumbering, beastly adjuchas. “We’ve taken the Shinigami’s word on their importance for maintaining balance, allowing ourselves to be prisoners to their paradigm since birth.”

Who was the first Shinigami and the first hollow, to discover this supposed balance, to require Ulquiorra’s life to be unknowingly sold into this manifesto? Who was the mightier of the two, to believe it their right?

Szayel regards them suspiciously. “This is a grim sermon you’ve chosen to impart upon me. What’s this mood of yours about?”

They work their jaw. “Nothing.”

“A rather talkative nothing.” But he doesn’t press any further.

So the both of them go in the direction of Ulquiorra’s tower.

Ulquiorra has just reached the top of a steep dune when they glance back to see how Szayel is keeping up. About halfway.

There is some wreckage of the city beside the dune, the crumbled top of it at the same elevation Ulquiorra now waits at, with a deep trough in between. The entire dimension feels off, but this area especially — a looming spectre of suspicion over their shoulder. The sooner they can leave, the better. It’s nowhere they belong anymore.

Szayel starts to say, “Surely it would be more reasonable if we —“ when something shoots out of the corner of their eye, and he’s vanished.

No, not entirely. He’s being dragged down the edge of the dune, desperately and futilely clawing fistfuls of sand in an attempt to get away.

He’s attached by a rope. Ulquiorra looks up to the broken tower. A Quincy is standing atop it, wielding a clunky firearm from which the rope extends. Even over the wide expanse, Szayel’s shrieks are loud enough to pierce the ear when the Quincy begins drawing him in and up.

Ulquiorra hesitates. But only for a moment. Only to consider how best to approach this.

Both of the Quincy’s hands are occupied with the weapon and trying to pull Szayel’s weight. There could be more behind the broken tower, each equipped the same. So be it. They’ll find a way.

Their sonído is yet faster than the gun’s pulley, which is struggling as Szayel slides into the lowest point of the trench. As the Quincy slaps the heel of his palm into the gun, frustrated with its catching rope, Ulquiorra dashes off the dune, finds their footing in the dense air, and lands on the stone next to the Quincy. He’s not even the time to shout before they’ve jammed their knee into his gut, and their fingers slide into his eye sockets. Their nails come away with thick gel on the undersides, though the heat of their cero compacting his skull singes the wetness away.

The decapitated (a bit more than that, they took a chunk of his shoulder as well) Quincy falls into the ditch, still holding the gun. Ulquiorra follows, walking off the edge of the tower.

They move to stand over where Szayel is rolled onto his stomach, one arm trapped underneath himself. He’s gasping desperately while his other hand is clutching his outer thigh, blanched with how tight his grip is. A vicious metal hook has sunk deep into the skin, three round pits like a bite from some creature.

He doesn’t have regenerative capabilities. They’d rather not take their chances with Gabriel again.

“Take it — fuck! _Out!_ Take it out!” Szayel bawls.

Ulquiorra kneels at his side, grasps the handle of the hook and yanks it out straight, so that each claw comes out at the same time. He sobs and writhes with such intensity that he nearly knocks them over. They hold his other leg away from the wounds, which spout more than ooze blood.

Next, they shrug off their haori and rip it into four long pieces. This is a familiar ritual. It makes their head spin just how much so. The first piece they wrap around his thigh immediately soaks through with blood. The second, slightly less so, and the fourth tight layer they tie off has only sparse blotches.

Szayel is shivering. He’s thrown his arm over his eyes and simply lays in the sand, though at least his whimpering has subsided.

“— Thank you.” He says it through teeth gritted not only because of the pain. It must be a difficult thing for him to spit out. They don’t know why he’s said it; just as they don’t know why they’ve helped him. He must understand that it would’ve been perfectly reasonable for Ulquiorra to have done nothing at all.

Should they have?

It doesn’t matter now anyways.

Ulquiorra goes to inspect the Quincy’s body, which fell a few metres away. The impact crushed his legs into several different angles. From the front of his uniform, they remove anything of interest: a small round medallion and a badge with an inscription they can’t read. The items are tucked into their trouser pockets before returning to Szayel.

In that time, he’s flipped onto his side with the uninjured leg, propped up on one elbow. Szayel reaches up at them, grabbing their wrist. Ulquiorra keeps a strong grip around his forearm and takes Szayel’s weight while he evens his balance on one foot.

Enough, then. There’s nothing else that can be done here.

Ulquiorra is about to tell him to signal a return to Soul Society with the communicator when a sharp flare of reiatsu cuts across their senses.

A large lump of something flies off the top of the ridge where the Quincy had been, colliding into the sand bank in a plume of smoke. It’s another body, they can see when the char clears. The body of another Quincy, sporting the burns of a cero — the edges of the raw flesh eroded around the ribs are crispy and peel away like ancient paint. The smell is acrid, lingering, and distinctly human.

Grimmjow drops into the ravine.

He looks up the line of Ulquiorra’s boots, his sharp toothed grin melting away when he gets to their face, his eyes like the blue flame across the desert. Nearly as scalding.

“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” he says.

Ulquiorra’s sentiments exactly.

“Take a look at what Hell spat back up.” Grimmjow saunters towards them, curling his lip pointedly. “What, did you find a way to bore eternal damnation too?”

They tilt their head just slightly. “Why are you here?”

“Sensed something big throwing down a few miles over there.” Grimmjow gestures to where the Quincy had come from. “Figured I’d have to fight my way through these assholes before I got to the main event.”

Ulquiorra meant _here_ more in terms of _on this plane of existence_ , but it answers the next question they had in mind.

“What exactly are the Quincy up to?” Szayel grits out.

“Hell if I know!” Grimmjow kicks idly at the burnt corpse. “These patrols of ‘em been running around ever since the Shinigami left. Stealing arrancar, killing arrancar. Never a lot at the same time, didn’t care much, ’til they started rounding up big lots of hollow and killing them a few days ago. Saw some of us in the uniforms, too. Anyways,” he rubs at the back of his neck. “Shit got fucked good when they took Harribel.”

“Harribel?”

“Queen’a Hueco Mundo.”

“ _Harribel?_ ”

“’S what I said, wasn’t it!?” Grimmjow snaps. “You got sand for fuckin’ brains?”

Szayel throws up his hands, barely staying vertical on one good leg. “Easy.”

Grimmjow flicks Ulquiorra in the shoulder. Their mouth twitches. “Yeah, and where’d this fancy shit come from? You haven’t been in Hueco Mundo for a while.”

“We’re _technically_ prisoners of Seireitei,” Szayel says. “The most tormenting aspect of which is having to endure my sentence with this golem. At any rate, the only reason we’ve not been left to rot in a penitentiary is because we’ve struck a deal. Help the Shinigami, breathe a bit of fresh air. Delightful.”

“That right,” Grimmjow raises one eyebrow. 

Reiatsu bursts from the direction Grimmjow had been moving towards — multiple, some mere flecks and others dark and oppressive. Ulquiorra recognizes most. They don’t want to think about what it means.

“I propose we go investigate,” Szayel says. “Three is a crowd, especially for our dearest Quincy friends.”

Grimmjow looks Szayel over, catching his eyes on the wound, and turns up his nose. He turns to Ulquiorra, shoving his fists back into his pockets. “He doesn’t have a zanpakutō. What’s the point of that, if he can’t use his resurrección? I say leave him. Something'll eat him and I got one less thing to worry about.”

Spoken as though Szayel isn’t there at all, already picked to the bone.

Szayel’s brow creases as he pushes the arch of his glasses up, even though the bone fragment never slips, and presses his fingers into his forehead hard enough to blanche the skin. “I need not be insulted in such a way that implies I cannot manage a minor injury.”

The long muscle of his injured thigh is quivering, and he’s trying not to sweat through the pain, but he isn’t rendered entirely useless.

Grimmjow grunts his compromise. “Whatever. Just don’t slow me down. ’M not turning back for anyone.” His sonído carries him to the top of the ridge, well out of earshot.

“I’ll make it,” Szayel says lowly when it’s just him and Ulquiorra. “Don’t try to make a face like you care. It’s unflattering on you.”

They won’t waste their breath to tell him to hurry, then. They catch up to Grimmjow, ending the discussion.

“Didn’t think I’d have to deal with any Espada again, especially not you,” Grimmjow shouts over his shoulder at Ulquiorra, mutters, “ _jackass_ ,” when they don’t reply.

Grimmjow stops at the top storey of a crumbled building, Ulquiorra planting a heel beside him. It takes Szayel several long seconds to follow, and he lands in the level below, panting as he leans against a half-wall. In the clear area between this building and a levelled pile of rubble are bodies, fighting.

It’s a bleak sight.

Immediately, Ulquiorra recognizes Ayon. The next logical connection is that the Tres Bestias must be near — if Grimmjow was right in saying that Harribel was captured, it’s intriguing to know that her companions are still alive, weak as they are even merged.

The Quincy absorbs Ayon. Ulquiorra’s body throbs distantly, like the bonds between their atoms are being dissolved in the same way just from their proximity to the epicentre. Everything below is playing out like a prearranged act, and they’re merely the observer. From this vantage point, they feel both removed and strangely in perfectly control. They could decide to do nothing. They could decide who lived and who died.

The fact of the matter is, they could decide. They have a power, an agency that they’ve never truly had before.

Beneath, the Tres Bestias have been revealed, and the Quincy is readying his arm to strike, when —

“That’s Kurosaki!” Grimmjow snarls and nearly leaps off the roof, out of the arched window frames that remain. And there is Kurosaki, sweeping back into the conflict like a soldering champion and drawing attention away from the Tres Bestias. But if Grimmjow rushes in now, his position is not the only one that will be revealed. He is nothing if not selfish.

Just as Grimmjow is about to speed past them, Ulquiorra darts out their nearest hand and grasps him by the throat, holding him in their punishing grip. His trachea ripples beneath their palm with a gurgled, choking sound.

“If you go now, the Quincy will kill us all and you’ll never have the chance to confront him again,” is Ulquiorra’s attempt to reason with a single-minded beast. They don’t care whether Ichigo is obliterated by a Quincy or Grimmjow’s cero — they would just prefer not to go down with him. It would be a pathetic death, considering the lengths they went to survive in the first place.

“Don’t fuckin’ touch me again, you little freak.” Grimmjow resigns, slouching from their hand and slapping it away for extra measure. He rubs at his throat as if he can get every trace of them off his skin.

His brain’s first coherent thought in a while, then.

Grimmjow waits beside them in tense anticipation as Kurosaki makes his escape, only to be thwarted by the recovered Quincy.

Kisuke Urahara. Ulquiorra’s eye is immediately drawn to him on the other side of the field — behind him the limp bodies of what can only be Orihime and Yasutora — because of the Quincy’s advance towards him.

They look over to Grimmjow. He’s already staring them in the eye. He needs no other prompting; he seizes the opportunity and bolts off. Ulquiorra’s eyes barely have time to stabilize on the image of him before Pantera is drawn from sheath and the Quincy’s head-to-toe.

Ulquiorra is not far behind. Szayel is screeching something indignantly before they’re out of earshot, but he doesn’t follow them. They stop beside the two halves of the Quincy’s body, watching the valves of his heart flutter and spittle up blood. It’s a very clean cut.

Kisuke is trapped beneath Grimmjow’s looming shadow, braced back on his hands on a half-crumbled stone shelf, stammering, “Wh—“

"Let's make a deal." Grimmjow grins, wide and feral.

Kisuke swallows, the action nearly audible against the side of Pantera. “What kind of deal are you thinking, Hollow-san?”

“First,” Grimmjow shakes blood off his blade with one hard motion, splattering the sand. Ulquiorra lurks behind him, turned to observe the halves of the Quincy. “I get to finish my fight with Kurosaki at the end of this. Don’t matter how or when, just that I do. Non-negotiable. I’ll kill all of you if you try to weasel out of it, and that motherfucker,” he jabs his thumb at Ulquiorra. “Isn’t gonna stop me this time.”

They wouldn’t. They have no duty to protect anyone, much less meddling humans who’d somehow dropped themselves into Hueco Mundo.

Kisuke’s lips press together tightly, his eyes twitching between Grimmjow and Ulquiorra.

Off to the side, Orihime is rousing Yasutora into consciousness, patting his huge arm sympathetically. She looks at Ulquiorra and pales.

“Second,” Grimmjow goes on, taking a step back to let Kisuke stand and dust himself off. _“That motherfucker_ got a bargain with Seireitei, and I want one of my own.”

Kisuke starts to say, “I wouldn’t know anything about it, I—“

“You’re a Shinigami.”

“I am, but—“

“You’re not dead, and you’re not in a jail, so you’re on decent terms.”

“You could look at it that way.”

“Then you’re going to talk to them! If you hold up your end on everything else, I’ll protect you here. You vouch for me. No prison, no contracts, no nothing. I just want to beat the shit out of Kurosaki and then I get to come back to Hueco Mundo. That’s it.”

Kisuke sighs. “I don’t have much of a choice, do I? You have my word that I’ll try my best. But you’ve mentioned only one term — what else would you have me do?”

He points to Orihime with a nod. It jostles her from her reverie physically, makes her tear her eyes from Ulquiorra. They wonder what evil deed of theirs she’d been remembering. “We got someone for the girl to heal.”

Kisuke waves a hand to beckon her over. She comes like a foal on trembling legs, clutching something swathed in green rags tightly to her stomach. The side of her face already blooms with mottled bruises and scrapes.

“Are you alright?” He asks her.

“Yes, I… I can do it.”

“Let me see what I can do to make a shelter in the meanwhile.”

Ulquiorra leads Orihime across the silent battlefield. The Tres Bestias, in the mayhem, have vanished. Closer to the rubble, Szayel limps out from behind one of the last walls standing. He braces the arm on his injured side against it, his leg hanging uselessly as he keeps it off the ground.

“So you did decide to take pity upon me and come back,” is how he chooses to greet Ulquiorra. They don’t know why Grimmjow even bothered.

Orihime leans in to inspect the wounds on Szayel’s thigh, but only for a second. The pits are deep and glistening with blood, the flesh torn in chunks where the hook had pulled and twisted. She seems horrified.

“What a way to introduce myself,” he says to her. “Szayel Aporro Granz. You’ve caught me in a bit of a dilemma. I usually look much prettier than this.”

“Hello,” Orihime replies tentatively, as if she’s not sure it was an introduction or the opening of a stage play. She hovers her hand over his leg, and the healing shield spreads out beneath. Each wound plugs back up within seconds.

When it’s done, Szayel grins and tests standing on both feet. “Delightful.”

“Ulquiorra —“ Her hand drifts over to their right arm. They smoothly arch out of the way.

She isn’t allowed to regret what has been done to them, what has been made out of them. It isn’t supposed to be as easy as to simply will it all in reverse, as though their body does not deserve to be scarred and wounded so long as it still determines to function. The memory would remain.

Ulquiorra has already suffered the phantom pains of Murciélago. They don’t know how much further their mind would be lost if they had to adjust once more.

“What is that?” Szayel points with a crooked finger at the thing in green that Orihime holds. Now, it’s obviously a small body. It seems unconscious, but alive.

Nelliel Tu. Ulquiorra recognizes her — or at least what she’d become. They’d lost track of her in their first fray with Ichigo, and neglected to ever consider her again. She was a remnant of Las Noches’s past now, replaced by the Vasto Lorde and her own inability to self-preservate.

Even with Szayel Aporro, Nnoitra was too stupid an enemy to fall to.

Orihime clutches at the back of the girl’s head, half green curls and half skull fragment. “Nelliel! I… think she hit her head during one of the explosions…”

“Ah.” The colour has drained out of Szayel’s face. Ulquiorra watches him closely, the little quirk at the corner of his lips and his unfocused gaze. He crunches his hands into fists. “She’s quite adept at that, isn’t she.”

“But she’ll be alright! Don’t worry!”

“Me, worried? Perish the thought.” A thin lipped smile. He ducks his head to correct his glasses and swipe the persistent length of hair over his eye. “Excuse me. I must insert myself into a situation without warrant,” before using sonído to make a hasty escape to Kisuke and Grimmjow.

Kisuke has managed to procure a tent by that time. He drops a caplet onto the ground and from it springs up another one. Szayel doesn’t seem particularly impressed, rattling off something about _electrical oscillations_ and a hypercompressor. The material is stiff and nearly the same colour as the sand.

“The tents are reiatsu-dampening!” Kisuke explains as he weaves in and out of one. “We won’t be completely protected inside, but our presence will at least be somewhat less obvious. Please get comfortable while I attempt to establish contact with Soul Society.”

Ulquiorra sequesters themself to the edge of the encampment for a few hours.

When they hear soft footsteps approaching from the left, Ulquiorra thinks it’s Szayel. Finally finished gossiping about Mayuri with Kisuke, perhaps. Sensing reiatsu is a hit or miss here now, but they don’t turn any amount to look until someone much smaller sits beside them. At the very least, a Quincy would have already attacked them.

It’s Orihime.

She kneels balancing only on her feet, wrapping her arms around her knees so none of her clothing touches the dusty architecture. Out of the corner of their eyes, they can see her observing Murciélago’s arm in the same sly fashion.

That’s what they’ve relegated to calling it: Murciélago’s body. It is easier to pretend that they are not whole than it is to accept their self-mutilation.

“I’m glad you’re fighting with us,” Orihime whispers after a while, faint over the wind and the distant, violent dust storms.

Her voice becomes watery, but it doesn’t tremble as it once may have. Large globs of tears splatter onto the ground, the only rain Hueco Mundo has ever seen. The dry stone sucks it up greedily, as it once did her blood.

“Sometimes I think about what happened here. And about what you did, how horrible it was, and how you meant all of it. I should get forget about it, I know. I should be stronger. I get a little mad, though, at the arrancar. But then I think about hollows, and how they used to be human. I don’t want to have those bad feelings towards other people because something bad must have happened to all of you a long time ago. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for someone becoming a hollow. You all seem so much in pain.”

Other people, she says. Ulquiorra isn’t a person.

“So I’m glad you’re alive, Ulquiorra.”

Orihime clearly isn’t expecting their reply. She wipes her hands on her thighs and stands to go.

“I killed Ichigo.” Ulquiorra turns their head to watch her. She pauses by the entrance to one of the tents. “Do you forgive me for it?”

Orihime rubs at both her eyes with the length of her forearm. It doesn’t come away wet anymore. “I forgive you. Because now, whether you want to or care or not, you’re helping him live.”

She leaves.

Ulquiorra looks back into the desert.

Stupid. That’s stupid of her.

They despise humanity. In an attempt to explain something that should not exist in tandem with ethereal concepts such as hope, love, joy, it attributes its own creations onto that which can’t possibly adhere to the same standards. Ulquiorra is a testament of evil as a cornerstone to life. And yet they must suffer through the motions of being given reasons for their actions and every breath they take, as though they cannot simply be. They cannot be left alone in their cruelty. Their spirit must be aberrated to squeeze itself into a familiar paradigm for the limited human mind.

Everything they do must mean something to a human.

In reality, nothing differentiates them from a snake, a weed, or a patch of maggots. Each of these things is found repulsive by a human. But because the essences of a snake, a weed, and a maggot have manifested into a familiar shaped vessel, Ulquiorra is somehow meant to be moral, accepting forgiveness, and empathetic.

If they were to have a heart, the only thing it would be full of is decay. They are not capable of sustaining anyone’s life.

Barely even their own.

Szayel does come to them eventually. He sighs dramatically as he sits against a vertical piece of rock, putting his legs in their lap and crossing his ankles. There’s not been much time for this, his touch, lately. Sometimes he is adverse to it. Sometimes he prefers that no one else see.

Ulquiorra thinks that he’s fallen asleep when his chin tips into his chest. They envy that, maybe. They don’t remember what it’s like to drift off. All they do is think.

So Ulquiorra thinks about themself dying.

It's a sword running them through from back to stomach, piercing their spine, rendering them incapable of any movement besides vomiting blood. That would be pathetic, to have climbed so many rungs of evolutionary ladder only to be caught unawares by an enemy's blade. They should have been better than that.

Inexplicably, they wonder next of Szayel's reaction. If he would mourn them, if he would laugh at them, if he would stare at them with that stony expression that bends his lips into a firm, but disapproving line. He has so many modes of existence, flowing into each one seamlessly but too randomly to predict. Sometimes he will react with indignation or gleeful mockery to the same circumstance. So as it stands, Ulquiorra doesn't know what he would do.

Perhaps what matters more is what they'd like him to do.

"Cifer." Szayel has leaned closer to them, removed his legs and folded them underneath himself. Ulquiorra focuses back to reality: alive, but still testing the waters of his moods. He looks a certain way, sitting next to them. Brows drawn, lips pouted contemplatively. They don't lose their mind like that very often. It's been happening more and more these days.

Ulquiorra twitches their head towards him, indicating their refocus in such a minuscule way only he knows. Their body is raw and hollow, knowing how well he understands them, how deep he's coiled himself inside of them.

With only the two of them here, Szayel places his hand on Ulquiorra's knee, curls his spidery fingers around the entire joint. They’re about to rest an arm on the span of his shoulders when they hear a gasp from behind.

Orihime; she’s swallowing down a grin behind a palm.

“I’m so sorry,” she squeaks. “But Kisuke-san wants to show us all something…”

Regardless of her apology, she shrinks against the debris and watches with a wide smile as Szayel pulls Ulquiorra up.

They follow her back to the makeshift workroom. She misses the way that his fingers linger and slot in between theirs, and how he kisses the back of Ulquiorra’s hand.

The sky creaks, more of it falls into the sand.


	5. THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY IS STILL MY ENEMY

Everyone is ushered back inside the tent. Kisuke had his associates in the human world deliver him scarce supplies through a Garganta — a portable computer, a collapsing table, and several small boxes of tools — but the procedure is unstable without a hollow’s natural descorrer.

Nel is seated on the table. Her lower lip trembles when Ulquiorra and Szayel enter, but she is otherwise quiet.

“Now, the first order of business.” Urahara displays a thin silver bracelet when everyone has settled, waiting. “I’ve finished a device that will allow Nel to stay in her normal form! Let’s give it a try!”

Szayel can barely lurch forward and blurt out, “I would advise not —“, before it clicks closed around her arm and her small body is consumed with a green reiatsu blaze.

When it clears, Nelliel is sitting on the table. She takes stock of the room and immediately clasps her arms tight around her exposed midriff when her gaze lands on Szayel. His darts away quickly.

“This is an interesting collection of people,” she says carefully.

She’s still the third that Ulquiorra remembered — weak by today’s standards. Even Grimmjow’s erratic highs are comparable to her, regardless of the numbers imprinted on each assembled corpse.

Ulquiorra had watched Nnoitra tear the masks off her fracción. They’d practically been invited to the spectacle. Once the tough skin melded into the bone fragments had snapped free, everything beneath had been gooey and pliant, pink and pulsing. The entire time, the two had not screamed for their own lives, but for Nelliel and her swift vengeance.

How honourable, and how stupid.

Nelliel Tu is tragically human, and the moral of her story is that there are no morals.

“So,” Nel continues. “The Quincy have given up murdering hollow and now want to wage war on Soul Society. Ichigo is on his way to save us all again, and we have a few days to get ready. Am I missing anything?”

“That’s the gist of it,” Urahara replies cheerily.

“Great.” She pushes herself up off the table and steps into a new uniform that Urahara holds out for her. “I’m going to stay here to prepare. You should all find the Negar ruins. It’ll be safer than sitting out in the open like this. Send for me when the time comes; I want to be there for Ichigo.”

“Negar ruins?” Urahara glances over to Szayel.

He looks like he’s trying to swallow down glass and shrink into the wall of the tent at the same time. “Yes. It’s an old cluster of buildings. Relatively functional and all that.”

Grimmjow snorts, “The pieces of Las Noches are a paradise compared to that dump.”

“But,” Orihime speaks up, in her own mousey way. “Wouldn’t it make more sense if we all stayed together? In case more Quincy are out here?”

“For the sake of safety, of course. It just wouldn’t be very productive or comfortable for most of us,” Nel says. “I’ll be fine. Trust me. Although, Orihime, why don’t you come with me? There’s food suitable for you at my tower, and I know the way to the ruins from there. You can get more training travelling back on your own. We never get to spend much time together.”

“I thought hollows didn’t eat.” Yasutora finally speaks.

A pause. An unstated call for any of them to come forward.

“We don’t,” Szayel answers, his hands wringing behind his back, his head low. “But we are creatures of habit and vice above all else.”

The faster this strange maudlin temper that’s suddenly come over him goes away, the better. He’s unbearable.

Orihime beams at Nel. “That sounds nice.”

Urahara hangs his cane on his forearm while he moves to pack his things back together. “We’ll go to the ruins soon, then. Let me monitor your condition with the device for a little while longer first.”

Nel nods. “I’ll be outside.”

“No!” Szayel exclaims. “I need — to run my own test — outside. On the atmosphere.”

The tent flap flutters behind his manic dash.

Everyone dissipates. Orihime engages Yasutora with something fast paced and rhetorical while moving outside, and Grimmjow is seemingly content being the uncharacteristically silent overseer of Kisuke’s clean up. Most likely waiting to jump onto the next opportunity to ask about Ichigo’s availability for a brawl.

Ulquiorra supposes they should find something else to do as well. They don’t know how long they’ve simply been standing there, half-focused on a distant, non-specific spot. Listening, always, but engaged from outside of their body.

“Grimmjow found you?” Nelliel asks. Surely meant for Ulquiorra, though she’s inspecting the tufts of pelt lining her gloves, giving away nothing. “That’s lucky. You and Szayel. Hm.”

Nelliel’s eyes glaze over Ulquiorra. Then she stiffens her posture, resolute, clutching the hilt of her zanpakutō close to her hip. “I would recommend staying far from Szayel Aporro. It’s your choice, in the end. But it would be a bad one if you didn’t. He’s nothing but trouble.”

They know.

“He destroys everything he touches.”

But they’ve nothing left that they haven’t already destroyed themself.

“What’s your contingency plan for when he decides to throw you away too?”

“Do you think he could?” Hasn’t he already tried?

Nel lowers her head. “Well. Good luck. Don’t stand too close to any precipices.”

Ulquiorra leaves. They don’t need to be lectured. Not from someone like her.

They find Szayel on a lower level of the rubble. He keeps his attention focused on the communicator, but doing something besides attempting to contact Soul Society. It wouldn’t work anyways — Urahara’s been struggling to establish a connection for some time.

Eventually, he puts it away and sighs out through his nose.

“How quickly the tide of discovery turns upon those who welcome it the most. To think only a year ago I was so very delighted to stumble upon a Quincy. Such is the folly of an eternal youth.” Szayel smiles up at Ulquiorra, but bitterly, further distorted by a bite to the inside of his cheek.

 

* * *

 

Szayel hasn’t been able to close his mouth about the mess that Kisuke managed to create in the mere hours he’s been in Hueco Mundo. He mills about the area, until he delicately arranges a slightly crumbled medallion onto a machine with a spinning disk.

Oh — the things they’d taken from the Quincy. Ulquiorra pulls both objects out of their pocket, placing it on Kisuke’s table. The medallion is the same as the one taken from the Quincy that Kurosaki battled, and Kisuke squints at the badge.

“Jagdarmee,” he sounds out carefully.

“Hunting army,” Szayel provides. “It would explain the dwindling numbers of arrancar, no?”

Kisuke rubs at his stubble. “I suppose so. From what I’ve gathered, these medallions are capable of stealing a bankai. It’s already been used on those fighting in Soul Society.”

“You’ve been in contact?”

“Rather disastrously. It’s tough going. Mayuri and I have been unable to come up with any solutions — he doesn’t even really want to cooperate with me!”

Szayel immediately perks up, a particularly wild glint in his eyes as he leans over the medallion. “Mayuri? Struggling? Oh, tell me more, Kisuke. This is _really_ doing something for me.”  

“I —“ Kisuke shuffles uncomfortably, and immediately changes the subject, “Ulquiorra — what’s happened there?”

Ulquiorra follows his pointing finger down to their right arm.

“Their resurrección. Have you even fought a hollow?” Szayel jeers.

“Not… in so many words.” Kisuke reaches out to them tentatively. “May I?”

Ulquiorra answers, “no,” for no reason besides that they were given the chance.

Szayel snorts. Kisuke pulls back, clearly startled by the fact that he’s actually been refused. Mere courtesy. He should have touched them, inspected them anyways. No one has ever asked before. They've rarely ever had ownership over their whole body. 

“It’s only that I’ve never seen something like that happen before. Admittedly, I’ve had no chance to study arrancar, but would I be wrong in assuming it’s like bankai?”

Szayel laughs mockingly. “Exceedingly incorrect.”

Kisuke twitches. He doesn’t expect the little sympathy he gets from arrancar. He has a way with words the same as Szayel. The intention is different, but the outcome is the same: deception. Half truths. Ulquiorra isn’t necessarily condemning it, their way is to obliterate truths or lies altogether and speak neither. Is that not in itself the greatest deception. 

“The largest distinction of the two lies within the resurrección’s appearance itself,” Szayel continues. “Unlike your bankai, a resurrección completely transforms our bodies because it _is_ our body. In another form, from another stage of evolution, but still the essence of our being. It isn’t a separate entity we must master. We ourselves are like your sealed zanpakutōs, waiting for our true potentials to be released.”

He gestures lazily at Ulquiorra. “The Cuarta ended up looking like the scene of a violent crime because of damage they sustained in battle, I suppose, which was too extensive to recover from. At least, this is what I theorize, considering they’ve not shared a word about their foray with Kurosaki Ichigo. They’ve been thoroughly _post-traumatically stressed._ ”

“Right,” Kisuke says.

“This is taking you quite a while.”

“What is?”

“The epiphany all my babbling should have given you. The solution to your bankai problem.” Szayel sweeps forward and takes Ulquiorra’s right hand, waving their claws at Kisuke. “This! Arguably the thing that Quincy fear the most!”

Kisuke’s face brightens. “Hollow as poisonous to Quincy. But — the Quincy we fought absorbed Ayon at no detriment.”

“Urahara, Urahara,” Szayel admonishes. “Surely I need not explain the difference between reishi and reiatsu to you. Ayon may be comprised of pieces of arrancar, but he is not a hollow himself. Standing akimbo next to a Quincy would do no more than start a row. What we need is hollow reiatsu — a reservoir of hollow reiatsu.”

“It makes sense in theory, but just talking about it doesn’t prove that it could work. We’re working with scraps here, if you couldn’t already tell. 

“You are so truly indebted to me and my genius fancies. My laboratory, of course, should have some equipment that I could repurpose. It depends how much of it Mayuri got his grimy hands on and how much of the rest he blew up by nearly murdering me. Here,” 

Szayel relinquishes the communicator over to Kisuke with a coordinates grid on the screen. “That’s where the ruins are. We’ll all split ways and reconvene when it’s all said and done. Believe it or not, but beneath all my charm, I’m not a very trustworthy person. I am, however, someone who prefers not being executed over and over again as punishment for violating my parole conditions. We will be back.” 

“I’m assuming you mean to bring Ulquiorra along.”

“Attached at the hip and all that.”

Kisuke sighs lightly, perhaps sensing that there’s nothing else to be done about it. “Don’t delay, then. I understand the well-being of everyone in Soul Society doesn’t strike a chord in you, but it is at stake. 

Outside the tent, Szayel tugs Ulquiorra by the fingers before they can walk away too far. They’d not noticed he never let go.

He asks in that whiny, whispery tone of his, “You do want to go with me, yes?”

They look him straight in the eye, but don’t answer. Shouldn't it be obvious? Ulquiorra no longer has anywhere to go except with Szayel.

Szayel doesn’t need much more than that. He bends over to kiss them, both of his palms cupping their jaw.

It should be expected that slipping away from the camp would not come easily. A half kilometre out into the desert, Grimmjow flickers into existence in front of Szayel and Ulquiorra, slouching as he trudges backwards across the sand. He curses when his heel scuffs an uprooted quartz branch. Unpracticed in something as rudimentary as walking — he shoves through obstacles and situations with the finesse of a bull that has its head in its ass.

“Urahara sent me to go with ya,” he offers as way of explanation.

The bridge of Szayel’s nose crinkles. “Aren’t you supposed to be his guard?"

Grimmjow shrugs, “He’s got some sort of robot,” spins one finger around in the air to illustrate, “Says it’ll be good enough for now. Whatever — he was a Captain, wasn’t he? Not like he can’t kill anything." 

The tips of Ulquiorra’s fingers tingle. Benihime. They remember. Their body has become nothing more than a war memorial.

Grimmjow falls into line, gripping Szayel’s upper arm and laughing as he squeezes. “You need me, too! Wouldn’t catch you carrying shit anywhere with these, candy-ass.”

“Yes, yes, point taken, we recognize your merits and welcome you as a member of our marauding expedition.” Szayel ducks his head and wrenches his limb back, hiding his eyes beneath his swaths of hair as he fiddles with his glasses. His lips are drawn tightly and the patch of skin between his jaw and the collar of his clothing is tinged pink. Embarrassed?

Szayel crumples even further when he sees the state of his tower. His hands drift uselessly over the rubble, picking bent pieces of metal and nearly indistinguishable equipment from it. Brightly coloured blocks have become bleached by the shards of sun that still linger in the sky, glass fused together from the heat of the explosion and then whittled by the wind back into sand. Ulquiorra didn’t have much time or focus to notice the extent of destruction the last time they’d been here.

Their elbow gently prods Szayel, and they gesture with a nod towards a hole in the ground, the ceiling to the lower levels. There’s no use in mourning rock.

It’s a different opening from the one Ulquiorra had used, this one spilling directly into a laboratory. 

“Perhaps not the correct section,” Szayel grimaces as he begins tidying. Out of habit, certainly, but still as though he’ll ever return here. “I’ve stored many of my manuals here… somewhere… if I can locate the relevant ones, recreating the machines is just as good. Who knows if the originals have survived.”

Ulquiorra follows him purposelessly as he weaves through the different areas. Grimmjow ducks beneath collapsed ceiling structures, looking over his shoulder at every creak.

“Oh, but what a waste," Szayel sighs wistfully, rifling through some crushed cabinets, succeeding in only further crunching more glass and bending more metal. "So much state of the art equipment, all lost." 

Grimmjow clicks his tongue and levels a glare at Ulquiorra. "You don't have to tell me about it. I'm not the one who was told to protect the city and did a fuckin' bang up job of it. Letting some kids get away from us like that."

Now that's irritating. 

"Kurosaki left you bleeding out in the sand before the real battle began," Ulquiorra deigns a reply.

"Those are fighting words," Szayel intones cheerfully. He disappears behind a fume hood.

"They sure fuckin' are!"

Ulquiorra’s not done. "At least I was strong enough to kill him twice. You lost to his mere bankai.”

Grimmjow looks ready to lunge at them. He may have, if not for —

“Alright!” Szayel snaps, having emerged from behind the broken appliances empty-handed. “Enough! I am not your designated guardian, but I’d also like to not have to explain to Urahara why I’m the only one coming back in a shape that’s somewhat distinguishable as a human body."

Szayel shifts his gaze between Ulquiorra and Grimmjow with a peculiar glint in his eye. His frustrated pout turns into a wide, thin lipped smile, obviously pleased with what he must have just thought of.

“Listen,” Szayel begins slyly. “I could cut the tension between us with Ulquiorra’s blunt zanpakutō. This isn’t an optimal working condition for anyone! I propose we… relieve some stress. Start new! Burn some bridges!”

“Yeah?” Grimmjow scoffs. “How do you figure we’re going to do that? You givin’ me permission to kick Cifer’s ass?”

“No… But perhaps there’s something else you could think of to do with Cifer’s ass.”

“Oh,” Grimmjow says stupidly.

Ulquiorra doesn’t exactly have any qualms with it.

Sex with Szayel Aporro was never concerning power or the exercise of such. He was something to occupy the lulls in their time. It was something that, perhaps for the first time in his life, lacked underlying metaphor. Without fuss, without frill, and without thought. They rarely gave any protest to him and his practiced hands. He was capable of forgetting, if not accepting, that they were his superior.

But Grimmjow is as closely associated to power as a volley of arrows is to war. He has never put down his flaming banner, whether it be marked with victory or defeat.

Ulquiorra doesn’t want complications. They don’t want this to mean anything that it shouldn’t.

Grimmjow shoves his hands into his pockets and grunts to break the silence. “Yeah. Alright." 

“Ulquiorra?” Szayel raises an eyebrow at them. They suppose they have to give some sort of agreement beyond throwing themself into whatever fray occurs, so they nod. 

What unfolds is a very interesting situation indeed.

Grimmjow, Szayel Aporro, and Ulquiorra all in a room — and no blood on the walls.

“Don’t get any ideas,” Szayel is chiding from the door, pushing it closed manually after ushering the three of them into a lounge one door over from the laboratory. He’s stalling, meandering around the room. It’s supposed to be carnal, not carnage. He shouldn’t be nervous about it. “This is absolutely an exception. And a one time offer!” He wags his finger at Grimmjow.

The air is tight, especially between Grimmjow and Ulquiorra. He’s stood with both fists clenched in the middle of the room, looking as though he’s been frozen in place. The imminent violence is tangible. Like a fist. Or a knee. They would take a chance with a kick to his gut.

But that’s not what any of them are here for.

Ulquiorra leans against the back of a square sofa, tilting their head back both to meet Grimmjow’s eye and challenge him.

He thinks he can vanquish them in more ways than one. He can try.

“Your first time?” Szayel has suddenly materialized behind Grimmjow, whispering sweetly into his ear. “No need to be shy. They’ll get bored and walk away, and there’s no reason to give them any ammunition to embarrass you with. Let’s just all try to get along.”

Or else he’ll have many conspicuous bloodstains and not enough explanations.

It seems to be going well: no arguing, no swings thrown, no taunts. The nature of beasts seemingly changed. But Ulquiorra can see the ripple of Grimmjow’s muscles as he edges nearer, the tightness with which he holds his core, expecting an attack from all fronts. He moves slowly, to not sound any alarm bells. He thinks them an animal of flight, easily scared by his erratic patterns. Not scared — only vigilant. 

When he finally is standing before them, Ulquiorra takes the liberty of unzipping their uniform to the beginning crescent of their hollow hole. Immediately, Grimmjow leans in to smear his lips under their jaw. Feeling their lazy pulse beneath his tongue. Disgusting.

But he’s not so bereft of any substance between the ears to stop there. He seems to remember he has limbs when he grips their hips, the wide pads of his thumbs slipping beneath the side slits in their clothing. He is, however, greatly lacking in finesse. Grimmjow approaches everything like a battle: he holds them inelegantly, he hardly knows his tongue from his bottom lip, and his reiatsu is sparking uncontrollably. Nothing like the methodical touch of Szayel. 

Speaking of. Ulquiorra absently rests one palm on the slope of Grimmjow’s shoulder when they let their eyes wander to Szayel. Off to the side, but he moves to stand beside them. His cheeks are faintly flushed. He likes watching, then.

If Grimmjow ever learns how to keep his spit in his own mouth, Ulquiorra can humour Szayel whenever he wants.

“They always don’t kiss ya back?” Grimmjow finally pulls away, confident now.

Szayel laughs. “Only if you’re not nice.” He slides one hand to delicately hold Grimmjow’s shoulder, his fingers touching Ulquiorra’s and tangling together. “Allow me,” and he kisses them too, leaving glossy marks over their teeth. 

A booming laugh. “Alright,” Grimmjow snarls, pawing at Ulquiorra’s clothing like he’s barely any control over his body.

Too much control, or not enough.

Perhaps Szayel and them can teach him some self-discipline.

 

* * *

 

Ulquiorra is the first to recover.

They regain awareness of their body in pieces. They slide up onto their elbows first. There wasn’t much room for maneuvering on the slim sofa: Szayel is on top of them, his head tucked into the gap between their shoulder and the armrest. His blunt fingernails make absent patterns along their ribs. Grimmjow is seated on the floor at the opposite end of the sofa. One of Szayel’s calves dangles down into his lap.

The frenzy has worn away. For a few moments in the middle of it all, Ulquiorra’d expected someone’s throat to be chewed out.

“Fourth time’s the charm,” Szayel says airily. Grimmjow makes a defeated noise. But he still goes onto his knees, leans over to mouth a sloppy trail up Szayel’s leg to the enticing dip in his back. 

Szayel gasps wetly into the underside of Ulquiorra’s chin. “I was half joking, but —“ 

“Nah.” Grimmjow wipes his reddened lips. “Tired.”

“Oh, please,” Szayel whines and squirms down into Ulquiorra’s hip. They could do something. Their fingers twitch with all the things they _could_ do, but their arms are heavy and their mind slow. 

They may not have to do much at all, in the end. It seems that Grimmjow is easily persuaded. He perches in the tangle of Szayel and Ulquiorra’s legs, slips a hand down between them until Szayel is finally sated and whining now for the opposite — _please, that’s enough, that’s enough_. Ulquiorra only cups the back of his skull, sometimes stroking through his hair.

“Hey,” Grimmjow mumbles after a short reprieve. “Weren’t we here for something?”

Szayel scrambles off Ulquiorra to redress himself, chiding them and Grimmjow as merciless distractions under his breath before he rushes back to the laboratory. He must be tossing through all his apparatuses with vehemence, if it’s audible through the door.

Ulquiorra composes themself more slowly, peeling off the sofa and picking their things up off the floor. Nothing torn. Szayel would heave a tempest if they asked him to stitch, too.

“Wanted to be like you, y’know.” Grimmjow flicks granules of sand from his sleeves as he rolls each back up. “Wanted to be powerful enough to have everyone know it, just by looking. Without having to fight to prove it. S’all I wanted.”

“There’s no point. No one will fight for you.” Ulquiorra says. It has to suffice. This is the first civil conversation they’ve had with him, and it will be the last. It doesn’t suit either of them.

“Fuck,” groaning as he scrubs a hand down his face. “Fuck. We bonding or some shit?” He guffaws. “Don’t take it the wrong way, asshole. ‘M still gonna thrash you one of these days. I just gotta get Kurosaki first.”

The both of them stand side by side for a long, quiet few seconds. Grimmjow leans down to kiss Ulquiorra. They turn their head before he can, and he pulls back.

He doesn’t get what Szayel gets.

This was different.

Grimmjow doesn’t try again.

When the ruins are in sight on the horizon, Grimmjow says over his shoulder, ”We’re not going to tell anyone about what happened.”

"'Getting fucked by Grimmjow' is by no means brag-worthy,” Szayel drawls.

“Why’d you do it then!?”

“To sate my curiosity! Oh, don’t worry, you were just fine, patch your ego back up. I only fear for my reputation. What will I do, if all people can imagine when they look at me is some _beast_ rutting on me." 

He scoffs, but humorously enough. “Sounds to me like that’s exactly what you want people to think about.”

Szayel lifts a dainty hand to his chest. “It hurts knowing how little regard you have for me.”

Closer yet, Kisuke pokes out of a window on one of the buildings. He flaps his hat, “Yoo-hoo! You’re just in time!”

Relics from a city past. Nothing as sprawling as the complex systems of labyrinthine hallways, and long discarded even before Las Noches was under development, but something nonetheless. This small collection of assorted archways, decorative aqueducts, and sand bitten spires make for a peaceful retreat, beneath the moon rather than a shield of non-discriminate light. 

Three squat towers built deep rather than wide — one is buried to the upstairs balcony, but the second is atop a set of stairs with a closed hallway accessing the third.

Before Ulquiorra can further inspect the ruins with any detail, they’re being ushered up the steps and into a back room on the first level, already cluttered with Kisuke’s things. Within the next few minutes, Szayel has assembled his machine with minimal squabbling over his schematics, and is tightening a band around Murciélago’s upper arm while Ulquiorra is seated up on the counter.

They never did agree to this, did they?

Kisuke starts, “Are you sure —“

“Absolutely,” Szayel snaps. But his fingers are trembling when he finishes fastening the band. “This is all very convenient, nearly emblematic of fate, really. There is a difference between arrancar reiatsu and our hollow reiatsu, how great it would be to a Quincy is besides me… but this little devil in a suspended state of resurrección has practically been dropped into your hands.”

Szayel slips on a pair of black rubber gloves, runs a caustic smelling cloth over the end of a syringe and a two-pronged probe.

“What’s the… ah… ethical standpoint on this procedure?” Kisuke peeks over Szayel’s shoulder, his brows drawn tightly. His eyes sparkle. He doesn’t really care.

Szayel fixes Kisuke with a sharp look as he swabs the inside of Ulquiorra’s arm and the back of their neck. “You should be hanged for even uttering the word _ethical._ I as well for being an accomplice to your blasphemy.”

“I’d at least like to know what’s happening,” Kisuke mutters sullenly. As if he doesn’t know what to do. He’s been helping Szayel assemble the equipment without trouble.

“The design is a repurposed reishi synthesizer,” Szayel lays a hand on the top of the machine, a smooth cylinder about the height of his hip which gives nothing away about its purpose from any outside appearance. The syringe and probe are connected to it by clear tubing, but it is otherwise featureless. “It served as the prototype for my fracción — merely seeing if I _could_ collect reishi and reshape its properties to be regenerative. Of course, I could. With some minor tweaking, it should now parcel up Cifer’s reiatsu into a solid substance, which will react with a bankai.”

“When you say react, you mean hollowfication.”

“A bit of a dirty word, isn’t it? Yes. Temporarily. It has no lasting effect.”

Kisuke laughs humourlessly. “We’d all like to believe that our meddling has no effect.” 

Szayel presses his lips together. “Did you happen upon a moral compass, or can we get on with this?”

“By all means." 

“Splendid.” Szayel turns back to Ulquiorra, holding up the syringe first. He fixes a thick needle to the end, and inserts it into a metal attachment. “You’re going to be in a fair amount of pain. It can’t be helped, working with conscious… living specimen. Hardly my favourite.”

The needle slides into Ulquiorra’s right arm, between a cluster of feathers. Deep. Unsettlingly so. But hardly painful.

Until Szayel goes around behind them and jams the pronged probe into the base of their skull. Their breath stutters in their lungs. His knuckles stroke down their back.

The skin will heal, but how long will the root of their brain, their spine retain these marks, like the unhinged jaw of a snake? How many times over will Soul Society scar them?

“Now, if you would,” Szayel says. “Focus your reiatsu into your resurrección. The device will do the rest.”

Difficult. As if Murciélago senses that she’s being pillaged and has turned into a greedy miser, keeping all of herself in Ulquiorra.

Their skin burns, but they manage. Rather than rolling off them in waves, the tubing off the syringe and probe turns dark and electric with their reiatsu. Szayel keeps the metal attachment steady, but his eyes are narrowed as he observes the black, green edged reiatsu.

He knows it’s not what it’s supposed to look like.

He knows Ulquiorra, but only in parts.

The machine emits a shrill noise and begins churning, working. It’s not as though reiatsu is a thing that can be depleted — but it leaves Ulquiorra emptier inside than they thought possible.

And then:

The sips of their reiatsu by the machine suddenly becomes unmistakable, tangible, nauseating. Vision like they’re watching themself from above and behind. Hot, along the seam of their elbow. The back of their skull throbs until it pounds, and they wish instead that the probe would drive so far in that it would decapitate them and be done with it.

Despite whatever feats of survival they've managed to accrue, it's still true that they cannot regenerate their brain. Perhaps this is the cause of everything. They can't think right anymore. Their mind was left to go rancid under the sun in some forsaken corner of Hueco Mundo, and now they only receive its feeble death rattles. 

Ulquiorra’s knees close, their dangling feet drawing up, a noise stuck in their throat.

The machine trills rapidly.

“What, what’s happened?” Kisuke, inching closer.

“Nothing,” Szayel barks, moving to stand in front of Ulquiorra. “Stay still." 

Either the machine reaches a new decibel of screeching, or Ulquiorra is losing ear cells.

The heat comes in waves, swirling at the back of their head, until they breathe, and it all slips away from them. Or comes back, filling their hunched spine and deflated ribcage.

Szayel pulls the needle and probe out clear, applies a swab to each area, and stows the tools in a compartment on the side of the machine. Returning to Ulquiorra, he cups their cheek and with the other hand flickers a small flashlight across their pupils. The flat of his thumb jams into their pulse point.

He mouths, “Good?”

Ulquiorra gives a languid blink in response.

“Good,” repeats Szayel, louder, to appease Kisuke. “The synthesization will be complete shortly. I assume you’ll know what to do with it and how to get it to Seireitei.”

Kisuke assures him, “I’ve got it covered." 

Yasutora pokes his head in from the foyer then. “She’s here,” he says, cryptically, before Orihime appears under his arm, pulling her hood down.

“Orihime!” Kisuke greets, taking her cloak. “You made it!”

“It wasn’t too bad — just really windy.” She twirls around to observe the high stone ceilings and plain, unmarked architecture. “Amazing! I wonder what these buildings were used for…”

“Nothing unusual,” Szayel says. “Ritual sacrifice, cannibalism, fratricide.” He pauses when he senses Orihime’s unguarded look of nausea upon him. “Do you expect me to say I’m joking?”

“This isn’t everyone, is it? What about Grimmjow?” She changes the subject quickly.

Yasutora points to the stairs. “Exploring. There’s places to sleep." 

“That’s good!” Orihime looks like her jaw’s been straining to contain a yawn for hours on end. “It was a lot longer of a journey that I thought it’d be…”

“Go ahead,” Kisuke swats at everyone. “I still have some work to do here, it’s best done in private.”

Yasutora shrugs and leads Orihime out back into the foyer, at the top of the stairs. She demonstrates something with large, excited arm motions. Ulquiorra slips off the counter and takes a leisurely pace up the stairs, rolling their sleeve back down over their feathered arm. The needle wound is already faded, but the hole where it’d once been is… defiled.

Ulquiorra’s body is a map of violation — of themself and of others.

Grimmjow is perched on the windowsill at the end of the hall, only looking over his shoulder at Ulquiorra. He opens his mouth, his lips curling around his teeth like he’s readying some venom to hurtle at them, but he gives up and turns back just as quickly.

Ulquiorra goes to the room on the left. A windowless, dusty rook, the walls peeling and cracking in lightning pattern fissures. The furniture is cast out of stone, but on the shape most akin to a bed is a single, flattened cushion. Good enough. Ulquiorra doesn’t expect to use it as is. 

“There you are.” Szayel meets Ulquiorra in the doorway as they’re about to venture onto the roof. “A phantom of the night, slinking off as quietly as you do.”

Someone clears their throat.

“Oh, Orihime,” Szayel sweeps to stand beside Ulquiorra, facing her, his hand floating on top of their shoulder. “I never had the chance to give my compliments on your _darling_ little wardrobe while you were in Las Noches. Well, I wouldn’t design anything less, but it truly came together when you wore it — and then of course this miscreant,” he waves vaguely towards Ulquiorra. “Allowed my hard work to get all torn up.”

“I —“ Orihime starts. “I just want to get into —“

“Anything to say, Ulquiorra?” He leans down, face to face. “Can you make the most meagre attempt to feign contrition?”

Ulquiorra’s eyebrow twitches at him.

He stands straight, shrugging dramatically. “They’ve gone mute again. It happens, you know. Like when a computer overheats, except with them, they think too hard, and the whole setup shuts down. It seems like someone failed to program the words ‘I’m sorry’ into them." 

They level him with a heavy gaze.

“Poor thing,” Szayel coos, catching the frayed ends of their tied hair between his fingers.

“Fuck you,” they say.

“It speaks! Any more profane words of wisdom to impart upon the unwashed masses, darling?" They don't answer. He pauses before looking back to Orihime, who is caught three ways between stunned, itching to flee from a now private banter, and erupting into laughter. Szayel smiles thinly. "I love our fleeting moments."

“About Orihime-chan's clothing..." Urahara calls as he ducks into the bottom of the stairs, and unfurls a piece of white and blue clothing. "Ta-da! A new design for a new era of adventure!”

Szayel recoils. "It's obscene. I'd say you have horrific taste, but nothing you've done has ever given opportunity to imply otherwise."

"It's not that bad!" Urahara deflates, folding the dress into a messy pile. "I could come up with something for you, too, Szayel."

"I wouldn't trust you to take my measurements, much less clothe me. Though," Szayel hums thoughtfully. "If I could get that dress for my little Ulquiorra here… It’s not as though they can _get_ any more dreadful looking." 

Typical.

Orihime is still looking at Szayel and Ulquiorra. Her cheeks scrunch up with her indiscernible smile. Hueco Mundo didn’t rob her of her child’s face. Her child’s soul is another story.

Szayel raises an eyebrow when he notices her. “What?”

Orihime shrugs. Delicate. “There’s something different about you two. Most of the other arrancar are so tense! Like they’re going to start fighting if they twitch the wrong way! Standing like…” she demonstrates by tensing all her muscles, hunching her shoulders and trembling with the effort. She’s not wrong. Números could sometimes barely stand Ulquiorra’s presence. “But you’re not like that. You seem like equals.”

Szayel huffs, pushing his glasses up reflexively as he ducks his head. “How quaint, that you think so. Cifer could blow my skull into a thousand discrete pieces if they so much as concentrated hard enough. The reason they don’t is because crawling my way out of their body sounds excruciating, and like it would ruin a good mood.

What you’re trying to describe is just an interaction with Grimmjow, anyways,” he says. “The vacuum between his ears is in a delicate balance with the universe. If he were to, for example, stop moving, or form a coherent thought, the whole thing would be upset.” Szayel mimes an explosion with his hands. “Chaos. Catastrophe. The end of life as we know it.”

“Hey, eat shit,” Grimmjow shouts from the end of the hall. “How’s that for a coherent thought, Granz?”

Szayel laughs.

Orihime points hesitantly to the room behind Ulquiorra. “Again, if you wouldn’t mind —”

“The brevity of a human soul, and you’ll still waste it sleeping!” But Szayel maneuvers around Ulquiorra as they step out of her way.

“What do the Shinigami want done out here, anyways?” Grimmjow has turned on the windowsill to face inside, bent forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

Szayel drifts over to the window, “We were tasked with stopping the Quincy from creating any more soul imbalances and, by implied extent, from adding numbers to the real battle. But…”

“But they’re all gone.”

“Yes,” Szayel’s lips twitch. “It seems so.”

“You feel it too?” Grimmjow says to Ulquiorra.

“Don’t feel, rather,” Szayel mutters.

Ulquiorra nods. Not since some time after Grimmjow killed the one — all of which had been weak flickers of reiatsu to begin with. Mere foot soldiers, but not to pad the strength of a standing army. Something else. 

Grimmjow groans and rubs his knuckles into the back of his neck. “Some weird fuckers. It’s not even like they packed up and left. Just stopped existing." 

Ulquiorra offers as much, “A logical choice, between a handful of conquerors or a thousand disposables.”

“Ain’t that how it goes,” Grimmjow drawls. “The strong do what they can, n’ the weak suffer what they must?”

Szayel sniffs indignantly. “This is all very strange, the two of you using your lizard brains like this.” 

“Feeling left out, Granz?”

“On the contrary, political philosophy is for boorish old men who are fully aware that they’ll be given the guillotine rather than a penny for their thoughts, extend their necks very kindly and, decapitated gob in the basket and all, still complain about the unfairness of the situation. So,” he gestures between Grimmjow and Ulquiorra. “Congratulations on becoming boorish old men.”

Grimmjow clubs him lightly on the arm. “Alright, saucebox, what bright idea have you got for what we should do instead?”

“You know what transpired the last time I suggested an… activity for the three of us.”

“So?” Grimmjow’s grin splits open over his teeth. Exposed parts of his skull. Uqluiorra’s ashes are scattered somewhere here. That which didn’t return to them. Ulquiorra forces a blink to clear their eyes of tired images of splintered mouths.

Szayel gasps in mock scandal. “In front of the children? Oh, the inhumanity of it all. What lecherous creatures, truly undeserving of contrition. No, I think I’ll claim the other bed until something more exciting materializes.”

“What were ya saying earlier, about sleeping being a waste of time?" 

Szayel offers nothing more than a shrug as he walks backwards, into the room across the hall from Orihime’s. “Could an immortal’s time ever be considered wasted? I’m merely waiting for the next Renaissance.”

Ulquiorra follows suit, Grimmjow’s mocking snort lingering on their heels.

Inside, Szayel is peeling off a cape he’d pilfered from the laboratory.

“Come here,” he beckons with an outstretched hand when he sits on the edge of the roughly carved bed.

They go to stand between his knees.

“Now, now,” Szayel says gently, almost chiding himself as he begins to slide their clothing down their narrow waist. “I know what I told Grimmjow, but I’m doing this for my own sake, that I don’t end up slathered in all the grime you’ve been collecting in this Godforsaken land. But if we happen into something and do it quietly… would you so firmly object to a bit of innocent hypocrisy?“

Ulquiorra leans down to kiss him, if only to spare themself from hearing the rest of his droning.

He ends up losing patience once he gets the top half of their robes down, only rucks down the waist of their trousers and crosses their ankles, still with boots on, at his tailbone.

Szayel sleeps on his stomach, his cape gathered beneath his head and arms as a makeshift pillow, and Ulquiorra sidled up to him on their side, one hand idle in the space between his shoulder blades. His skin is warm, always. 

They don’t sleep, because Aizen’s voice is sharp in their ears, telling them about how many times over they could have set the ruins ablaze with every human soul alive in it.

It’s easier to accept their reprimand in full consciousness than let it run through fantasy, when they can’t be aware of what’s real or not. 

Is it a testament to recent times, that _awareness of reality_ is a shaky definition for the waking world?

Some talk in the hallway, after a while. Ulquiorra moves off Szayel, sitting up to gather the fabric pooled at their waist when their eye catches on the solid block of their tattoo. Or — once solid. The edges of the numeral are beginning to fade, minuscule flakes peeling away and becoming like ash beneath their nail. They scrape at it, curious, but the ink is not moved. Only of its own accord, it seems.

“Mine as well,” Szayel chirps from behind them. He rolls over and extends one leg, bare but haphazardly coiled with a sleeve. So it is; the number on his inner thigh has peeled away unevenly, more so than Ulquiorra’s. 

He lays back more decadently, folding his arms under his head. “I suppose this means that soon we _can_ live as equals. Although,” he laughs. “On what level, I can’t be certain. Intelligence? Doubtful! That would be the day, no?”

Infatuated with the feeling of his own spit in his mouth. Ulquiorra pulls up their trousers to a more comfortable place.

So long without Aizen’s influence must have some sort of universal repercussions. Things fall apart.

When Ulquiorra tries to stand, it’s into Szayel’s chest, his arms pulling them back in. A tight fit, like the interlocking patterns of the doors that used to stand in his laboratory.

“When was the last time you slept?” Ulquiorra can feel his voice vibrating in their ribs more than hear him. He’s so thoroughly engrained in their bones, each fracture and regrowth a record of his laugh, whine, or shout.

Too long. It’s been too long, even for a hollow.

“Let’s take all of this off,” Szayel breathes against their cheek. “And I’ll make it worth your while this time — leave you no choice but to sleep. Hm?" 

Tempting. But Ulquiorra has made it thus far without sleep. If they’re able to force their body past its limits several times over as they’ve already done, it will hardly miss a nap. This is only one more hurdle to jump. Or lethargically drag themself over. However they get there, it’ll be on their terms.

Szayel can get himself off if he needs it on the hour.

Ulquiorra shakes his grip away and ventures out to the roof. Nothing there but the wind whistling through their empty skull when they clear the stairs, only primitive attempts at ramparts that have collapsed at the corners. They step off the edge, down onto the covered hallway that would connect the main building to the second, if only it wasn’t blocked with debris inside.

From on top of the structure, it seems like a very purposeful blockage now. There is no corresponding exterior damage to either building or the corridor. Ulquiorra approaches the connection to the second building; crude, where the otherwise uniform rock has been shaped together with a paste. A little bit above is a long rectangular seam, as if there’d once been a window or slim opening that’d been closed. Completely smooth, save for minor rippling, as if extreme heat had been applied. The fill looks newer. Less weathered. Ulquiorra raises a hand to trace it the line -- 

“Ulquiorra!" 

Ulquiorra turns back around, abandoning their curiosity.

Orihime is waving with both arms over her head atop the roof they’d just left.

She shouts, “Chad and I are going to train! You should join us, it’ll be fun! I think! Or… you could just show up whenever you’d like, too, if that’s better.” As a last ditch effort before she leaves, she adds, “Maybe we can get Szayel Aporro to try, too." 

Doubtful. He has scraps for skill in swordsmanship. The years he spent ducking past training was better invested in learning how to subdue his opposition with his mouth alone.

But Ulquiorra retakes a position on the roof, and watches.

Orihime and Yasutora train for hours at a time. The two of them run through an assortment of repetitive drills: he’ll throw her into the air (and nervously amble about to make sure he’s caught her again), or charge a barrier. Sometimes the barrier will crack, and other times Yasutora will be bounced back into the sand, flashing Orihime with a wide smile and an approving thumb. She will apologize every time without fail and clean the dust off his brow. 

Ulquiorra cannot remember an instance in which they’ve ever failed, as these children do. Is their power less legitimate, that they’ve never had to chip away at it? That they were created fully realized for the destruction of very dimensions?

Murciélago twinges.

What did you do, Aizen’s voice reprimands, the last time you failed? They wished to die.

Orihime and Yasutora go back inside when it’s obvious that their rhythm is losing itself, falling out of sync. There’s no rationality to pursuing something at the end of its usefulness, and at least they can recognize as much. Ulquiorra had known when it was time to give up. A pigheaded boy had brought it out of them.

Everything was backwards. Unpredictable. Ulquiorra no longer understood or controlled their world, if it was either theirs to begin with.

Ulquiorra is on their way down to Kisuke’s workroom when they pass Orihime and Szayel chittering on the intermediary floor. He’s sorting through the food Nelliel had given her, reading off the labels and dictating for which scenario one or the other would be best for. She’s already chewing on what looks like a rubbery bar of fruit meal. He flashes Ulquiorra a smile when he sees them on the stairs, the corners of his eyes crinkling.

They can still hear him and Orihime talking, the echoes floating down from the top of the stairs and a grate in the ceiling. Nothing interesting, until — “… Ulquiorra…” catches their attention, and they focus on the conversation. No one else is here to testify to their eavesdropping, or the way they further into the stairwell. 

Szayel speaking: “Are you looking for advice? I don’t have any. I don’t know any better than you. I know much better than you about science, physics, mathematics, biochemistry, death… but anything that’s… mm,” he clears his throat. “More delicate in nature relating to the topic at hand… it doesn’t fit into my paradigm.

The way I see it — one of these lunatics who think they’re God has got to be right about it eventually. Who’s to say the lunatic that we should have listen to this time can’t be a Quincy? So the world has already ended. What’s the worst that could happen now? Kurosaki sustains another concussion? I doubt he even has any more brain function to risk losing. He’ll be fine. He’s durable." 

Gaping silence.

“So do you like Ulquiorra?” Orihime asks.

No. He doesn’t. He can’t.

They hear Szayel’s swallows and gulps of air where he must be opening his mouth, then pausing. Speechless. For once in his life. “They’re… my partner. I believe that — requires some… sense of… regard.”

Ulquiorra doesn’t like that answer. They’ve half a mind to go and interrupt, for whatever reason, to stop this conversation from furthering. 

So it begs the question: do they _like_ Szayel?

They wouldn’t mourn his death, but neither would they tighten his noose. 

Isn’t that what it all comes down to? One’s willingness to live, die, kill, save? Those are the only extremes Ulquiorra has ever known, the only ones that have ever mattered.

“Look,” Szayel lets out a deep breath. “Ulquiorra is, by all human standards, a wretched little demon who has the emotional capacity of a wooden plank, and flosses their teeth with the tendons of their ilk. You have a crush on a _boy_. Your life will be easy. Learn how to make casserole. Start a business. Have babies."  

Orihime replies, “I don’t think that’s how it can work for us. Not when it’s up to me to make sure he doesn’t die and the world doesn’t end. Most people don’t have to worry about that sort of thing. I mean!” Then she sputters and backtracks, like she’s just realized what was said. “It’s very presumptive to talk as if he likes me too! And… _babies!”_  

Ulquiorra doesn’t want to hear anything else. They shove their hands into their pockets and venture to the foyer, where they can make out the shape of Las Noches if they were to squint.

“Well,” Kisuke appears beside them, wiping his hands down on the front of his tunic. “Didn’t expect to see you. I’m just getting a bit of fresh air. It’s been a while since I’ve had this level of excitement to keep up with!”

A beat.

“Well,” he sucks in an awkward breath. “I’d just like to thank you, for helping earlier. It was no small success.”

If Ulquiorra were going to reply, what would they even say? Should they be honoured, that their body is an opportune vessel?

“I… admit that hating hollow is perhaps the most natural feeling in the world to me. But!” Kisuke strikes up his spindly index finger. “I think that, considering what threatens us both equally, this camaraderie has been a worthy investment, if only for selfish ends." 

The core dilemma is not the Quincy: it is that Shinigami cause every misfortune they must face, and are more keen to give a vacant word of thanks than to accept their inability to do much more than devastate.

What is it, about the human soul, that it cannot realize, much less remedy its own faults?

Ulquiorra was enlisted by a Shinigami. They exist as living commentary of the inclinations of the human soul, if for nothing else. Autonomy is a coveted chimera.

“Alright,” Kisuke smiles thinly, shakes his hands off on his clothes one last time. “That’s all. I’ll leave you be.”

Ulquiorra remains outside for a while. They consider reinspecting the unused building, but they suspect little would be gained from smashing through a wall to see what was on the other side. There are some things they don’t need to know. As long as it’s all they see, it’s merely a building. They walk down the stone stairway and up the back of the ruins where the sands sink into a pit. Scraggly trees grow out of the sides, like the ruins had been terraformed on top until the bottom had sunk out from beneath.

Orihime and Yasutora are there, splitting a snack between and sitting on a sturdier trunk. The two must have just been training again; a patch of sweat has collected on the back of Yasutora’s neck. Grimmjow is crouched across from them and saying something inflammatory, judging by the wicked shape of his mouth. 

He whistles high and long when he sees Ulquiorra on the ledge. They close in on the assembly.

“Look who decided to grace us with their presence,” he taunts. “Too good to be seen with the common people who’ve actually gotta train, huh?”

“Grimmjow,” Orihime frowns. “You didn’t want to practice with us at all!”

His cheeks go red, his brows angling down. “Yeah, shut up. Maybe not with you two squirts, squashing you won’t get me anywhere. But if hoity-toity Cifer wants to let me finally throttle ‘em, I’m raring.”

Ulquiorra shrugs.

Grimmjow leaps up in a flurry of sand, cackling. “Alright! Here we go!”

He doesn’t give another second’s notice before Ulquiorra is catching Pantera on the flat of their radius, the blade shrieking against their hierro. Another hit. They switch arms: Murciélago. Some feathers fray when Grimmjow slides away.

There’s nothing stopping him anymore from going beyond a training exercise and killing them, really. Whatever laws of Las Noches he failed to obey in the first place have now been sufficiently obliterated. Ulquiorra has never tried to dispel a Gran Rey Cero.

They’re sure they could.

They’re not sure with how much trial and error.

Ulquiorra has fought no one but themself for the last year. 

Grimmjow is at their back, his presence hot with gathering reiatsu. They dash away, the sole of their foot just barely catching the smoke that billows off where they’d just stood, the sand now fulgurite. 

“Come on,” Grimmjow whines. “At least try to hit me! Don’t just run away!”

True, dodging him forever is as easy as it is tedious.

So when Grimmjow appears behind them and sweeps their ankles from underneath them, they use the momentum of their fall to plant their toes on his shin.

He pitches his zanpakutō down, the tip dragging through the sand. Mistake. Ulquiorra can see him swing before he even thinks to do it himself. They ram the flat of their thumb into the inside of Grimmjow’s wrist as it comes down over their head.

“—Oof,” like he’s had the air kicked out of him, his fingers unwillingly falling open and his zanpakutō clattering down between his and Ulquiorra’s boots.

It’s too late when he clamps his recovered grip around their hand, and he yanks them down into the sand. But Grimmjow’s victorious grin melts away when he leans further over Ulquiorra and first feels their raised knee at his sternum, and second the splintered edge of Murciélago across his throat, drawn from the sheath on their back. 

Grimmjow’s short chuckle implies that the loss merely rolls off him, but the crease between his eyebrows betrays him. He lifts off Ulquiorra and sheathes Pantera. “Got me.”

Clapping cuts across the field.

Szayel is up on the main building’s overhanging roof, folding his hands behind his back. “Even at the Colosseum, one had to pay to watch gladiators tear each other limb from limb — I’ve the spectacle for free! Come inside now, you toy sandbox soldiers, there’s news to be dealt.”

While Grimmjow and Ulquiorra can materialize themselves within a fraction of a second, Orihime and Yasutora must walk around to where the sand is level with a door.

In the room with all the counter space, Kisuke is wringing his cane. Most of his equipment is arranged at least neater than before. Nelliel is in the furthest corner, her lips twisted to accommodate her no doubt itching tongue. 

“What’s happening?” Orihime practically slides into the room, breathing heavier. “Is it news from Soul Society?”

“Yes, yes,” Kisuke says. “Waiting has paid off nicely —“

“Just how nicely is debatable, considering you forbade me from seeing what you were doing in here,” Szayel interjects.

“— And we’ve been called to help in the final throes of the battle. I warn that this means it will be the most difficult, but I trust that at this point we’re all aware of that.” Kisuke acknowledges a nettled Szayel, gesturing to a device on the nearest counter. “This is where our paths split! Your mission details are different than ours — maybe a little obsolete by now… I’ll leave that projector and transmit something through it when it’s safe to come back. Or if everything is going wrong and we need the additional help. It’s difficult to tell right now which one will be the case." 

“No,” Orihime says firmly, but her eyes are glassy. Yasutora has a firm hand on her shoulder. “We’ll be alright. We’re all ready to help Kurosaki-kun, and with that we can do anything.”

“Such confidence! You’re both charming and soaking wet behind the ears.” Szayel sneers. To Kisuke he asks, “How long should we wait before we can infer that every last soul in Seireitei has been vaporized and subsequently flee into the desert?" 

“My last mission in life will to be send a message your ways,” Kisuke replies with mock sincerity. “Be so kind as to give me a beautiful funeral pyre.”

“The Quincy would have to be quite atrocious warmakers if they don’t plan on giving you one themselves.” Szayel wiggles his fingers, “Allow me to do the honours,” and opens a Garganta.

“Godspeed,” he mumbles, contemptuously, only when it zips close behind everyone.

The silence of Hueco Mundo drags. Without Quincy and Kurosaki’s friends, the desert almost seems like it might someday lose its scars.

Szayel half-prostrates himself on the counter, extravagantly leaning one elbow onto it. “What are we do to now, with all this privacy?” His voice drops lower, in that way he does when he's still trying to seduce Ulquiorra.

He doesn't need to try. He need only tell them what he wants and they'll test their mood for whether or not they'll comply. They usually do.

For now, they take a stance against the wall across from Kisuke’s projector.

A reedy, embellished sigh. Szayel sits on a rudimentary block of stone in front of a counter with a manuscript and a pen. “And here I thought I was going to celebrate the potential death of all life as I’ve known it by getting my brains fucked out one last time. Instead, my Sisyphean task is to compose research reports for cockroaches to read.”

And Ulquiorra’s is to be crushed beneath their stone of regretful lusts. What else is there to be said about it?

For all his complaints, Szayel still takes to writing. Ulquiorra removes Murciélago to clean, swiping each side of the blade on their pant leg, picking granules of sand from the hilt. It’s as futile as anything else. The metal’s folded edges are exposed, peeled away where some splinters were more violent. Duller than dull.

“I’ve been thinking.” Szayel stops scribbling in the manuscript, both elbows braced on the desk. His face darkens when he glances up. “Many arrancar suffered a range of trauma whilst in resurrección, myself included, and all returned to their original forms without problem. Except for you. Why did your resurrección leave you so blighted? For that matter, how was it strong enough to withstand the powers of _the boy who saves the_ universe _?_ It’s time to confess, Ulquiorra." 

If Szayel wants to be the final judge of their secrets, which are now as meaningless as their life, then so be it.

“I have a second resurrección.”

It’s powerful beyond imagination, is the implication. Too much for their meagre body.

Szayel is breathing deeply and evenly, forcing the pad of his thumb so hard into the space between his eyebrows that the skin turns pressure white.

“You stupid fucking lummox. That would have— You’re really —“ he makes a pained noise, rubs his hand down his face. He doesn’t say anything for some time, only covers his mouth with his palm.

“I could have won the war if you told me. Even only a day before. I could have found a way. You know I could have. Fucking useless. You’re fucking useless,” Szayel states this with a hysterical laugh, as though he’s only just realized it.

Yes. Ulquiorra is useless. They’ve failed in everything they’ve set out to do, and now they only move because someone tugs at the strings attached to their limbs.

“You doomed us from the start. For what?” Szayel straightens from the counter, his stance loose and drawn tight all the same with anger, his voice barely keeping itself even. “For you to feel special? Because you couldn’t possibly bear to break your vow of silence for one second? Wonderful. Truly. What a wonderful job you’ve done here, you fucking megalomaniac.”

Ulquiorra knows Szayel: he will yell, he will shout, and he will run to find a dark corner where he can lick his wounded ego. 

Szayel throws his pen down onto the manuscript, ready to abandon his work entirely as he whisks past Ulquiorra. He wrenches away with unnecessary flair when they try to stand in front of him. His reiatsu is a jagged thing that sparks and fluctuates, needling Ulquiorra with his invoked ire.

It takes mere seconds for his juvenile charade to become draining. Even the children of Karakura Town hold more poise than him. Even they all went off to war with glee.

So Ulquiorra undertakes his ill temper. Not necessarily to quell it. If Szayel becomes so angered he attacks them, Ulquiorra has no qualm with putting their boot to his throat and lauding their prowess over him in the way that beasts do it. He shouldn’t forget what he is, and what they are. 

Ulquiorra closes in on him in a few short strides, gripping his upper arm and whipping him around before he can flee the room.

“You think I didn’t consider it?” Ulquiorra says. Szayel doesn’t look at them, defiantly turning his head to the side. The tops of his cheeks are hot and red. If he wants a speech explaining themself, then he’ll get one, just this once. “Accept this fact: some of the Espada could barely stand against Shinigami who were not even lieutenants. If they could achieve a second resurrección without ripping themselves apart, they would die against a Captain. I fail to see how it would be better." 

“Or are you more willing to throw your life away for an accolade you didn’t know existed until now like a jealous infant than to perform to the best of your ability? For all your questioning my intelligence, you’ve come out as the idiot, forcing my hand like this. Pull yourself together. Hold a grudge if you must. Just don’t waste my time doing it.”

Szayel’s jaw is tense. It must be difficult to pry open with how he grinds out between his gnashing teeth, “Despite your constant humiliation of me and whatever enjoyment you must get out of it, I’m putting my grievances away. We’re the only ones left and I need all the allies I can afford. But you’re up to your neck in blood. Especially yours and mine. Know that all the blame is on you.”

As if it wasn’t already.

Fine. They accept.

He looks scornfully down at them from the corners of his eyes, the frames of his glasses. “I always knew there was something strange when I couldn’t fully analyze your reiatsu. I slaved over it for some time. You exhaust me in so many ways. At least now I’ve one more answer.”

It’s an uncomfortable sensation that crawls like insects in their entrails, knowing how deep he can probe into Ulquiorra without ever laying a hand on them. Knowing Szayel, their blood may now be nothing but a gaggle of mechanical arms and legs.

 

* * *

 

 

The recall comes when Szayel is near to pulling his own hair out in his anxious wait. 

Ulquiorra would have been just as content sitting statuesque until the projector lit up, but their aimless treks always stopped at the sealed building. This made Szayel noticeably irritated. They were acutely aware of his trailing eyes whenever they so much as moved from one end of the room to the other. 

There seems to be some sort of basement as well. A long rectangle in the foyer that is the same mismatched concrete as on the side of the exterior walkway.

Szayel found reason to steal away Ulquiorra’s attention whenever they lingered on that spot for too long. He must think they didn’t notice.

So the projector trills to life on the table, unfolding to broadcast not Kisuke, and not even his Shihōin shadow, but Nelliel.

Her grainy voice delivers the succinct message; “It’s over. Try not to be too alarmed by what you see when you get here,” and the screen darkens.

If Hueco Mundo had been the badlands, Seireitei was the atrophied consequence of armageddon. There is nothing left standing except for mismatched architecture, looking like it’d been carelessly dropped on top the city. Though it all smells of blood and fire, it is muted and damp like in a blizzard.

Szayel and Ulquiorra tread through the carnage until life begins to creep back into it. There is a concentration of Shinigami towards the centre of Seireitei, huddled together beneath the oppressive winter storm of a Quincy reiatsu. It is suffocating, but there is a pocket of air filling up beneath it. Every breath becomes lighter.

Approaching a small wooden bridge connecting two training yards, Ulquiorra meets Ichigo’s eyes.

And Ichigo’s fist meets their nose.

Before anyone is able to stop him or realize what could arise from the situation, he has streaked over the wooden planks and barely had time to fully curl his knuckles before assaulting them. The back of their head cracks against the ground, pushed up against the bridge’s posts and therefore unable to escape. On top of them, Ichigo is heavy and his form blocks the sky. His fist does not stop coming down on whatever part of them it first finds: nose, cheek, the socket of their eye, jaw.

“That’s —” The heaviest blow thus far. His low snarl. “— for what you did to Inoue!”

What did Ulquiorra do?

Ah. Yes. Broken her.

It was nothing personal. It had been their order.

After so long, this boy was still so upset over it? Had her soft soul retained scars so deep? Perhaps Ulquiorra should then not disclose how many times they prodded her veins with that needle and their unpracticed hand.

She’s forgiven them, anyways. Apparently.

Orihime, Ulquiorra thinks, would not approve of such violence on her behalf.

Or maybe she would. In the unforgiving place where her heart has gone solid and protective of itself, maybe this is what she's always wanted to do herself.

It doesn't matter either way, when she's not there to witness it. Ulquiorra used to bear no scars; no one was able to infer anything from the state of their body. Now they are a wasteland. It should come as no surprise that eager scavengers take every opportunity to pluck it apart.

They would think that his flurry of punches would be more for their killing him twice rather than what had been done to someone who was in fact forced to live. They should not, however, expect him to be in any means logical.

That was the learned nature of the heart, was it not? That a little girl would stand before a monster, one soaked to the elbow in the blood of her friends, and say she was not afraid. Reach out to that gored hand, too, which was only attempting to dig its way through her chest. It is not a message of bravery. It says nothing for the heart but that it is treasonous to life and betrays wisdom.

Then to have the audacity to try and forgive all of it.

By the time Ichigo is pulled from Ulquiorra, writhing and hissing all the way, he’s done a number on their face. They can feel their teeth realign into their gums, raw and fleshy and in bits on their tongue. Their eye throbs, but its vision clears soon enough. Jaw — clicks back into place. Where the orbital bone beneath that eye had been sunken in, their sinuses pop and bend with the restructuring of their skull. It was good it had not reached any deeper. They may have been in a spot of danger.

The kill count would be at a tie.

But the fool borne of violent impulses suffers the most. Ichigo’s knuckles are shattered, and he clutches at them feebly now that his adrenaline is dissipating.

The heel of Ulquiorra’s hand blocks a surge of blood from their nose as they sit up, the last to be repaired.

It was high time for them to sustain some wounds from the war as well. At least it cannot be said now that they escaped unscathed.

Ichigo calms, though barely so. Nelliel and a Shinigami are holding him by the arms, and he’s heaving through both his exertion and his injury. He’s just added another would-be god to his collection of skeletons, after all.

“What do you want? Why are you here?” Ichigo asks. Yells, yowls like a plucked hatchling, more like.

It’s interesting that he would only think to ask this after first defending Orihime. Unexpected? No. Just interesting. Ulquiorra is still learning how to piece together the intentions of humans.

“Nothing,” they say, wiping a glob of blood from their top lip. “I want nothing to do with you.” 

It’s the truth. They’ve been doing that a lot; shedding their skin.

Ichigo slumps away from his keepers. His face softens a little. The boy soldier must always be ready to take up his arms. His mouth opens and closes, but then he’s swept away by rejoicing Shinigami who look near ready to collapse at his feet and anoint him with oil.

Nelliel lingers, her stare unwavering but weary in its own way. There is a new splinter down the centre of her mask. When everyone has whisked past her, she says low and steady, ”I think we should allow the remaining Quincy return to Hueco Mundo. Their home has been destroyed, and their leader is dead. There's nowhere else for them to go."

“You're kidding," Szayel sneers. "Do you know what Quincy are, or have you been sleepwalking this entire time? The entire _purpose_ of Quincy is to eliminate hollow. They're not going to roll over onto their backs and accept defeat so you can put a leash on them and -- what? Berate them gently if they begin massacring us again?"

"I have more faith in people than to think they are prone to nothing but violence. They’ve learned from their mistakes.”

“My God, you’re emptier between the ears than I thought. That’s the problem -- they're _people._ Have you even no preliminary understanding of human history? The connecting factor in all of it is that the product of everything is violence! We are the consequences of it!”

“How are you going to stop me? What are you going to do, Aporro?" Nelliel whispers. “Prove yourself right? Kill me?"

He inhales sharply. "If you ever --" 

"I'm going to rescue Harribel. And then I'm going to let the Quincy rebuild a home in Hueco Mundo. As far as I'm concerned about you, I'm not. You're still a prisoner of Seireitei."

Her posture is tight, a puffed up animal who's defended its territory. That's exactly what Szayel meant. He, Ulquiorra, Nel; they're animals. There is no comparing what they do to humans. The chains have been severed so thoroughly from the heart that there can be found no familiarity. 

"You're making a mistake," Ulquiorra interjects.

"You don't have to take his side."

Their eyes narrow. “The truth doesn’t have a side."

"Feeling chatty?" Nel shifts her glare upon them. "Spare me. If I'm wrong, you can point and laugh at my corpse in a ditch. But there is nothing in this world that isn't worth trying."

“Nelliel,” Szayel whispers sharply. “I am attempting to reason with you. You have nothing to prove by doing this. No one is looking to you for solutions to the aftermath of this war. I know you have this _complex_ —" 

“— Oh, _I’m_ the one with the complex —“ 

“But you can let this one go.” Szayel’s makes an abortive gesture, like he’s simultaneously trying to shake good judgement into her and strangle her. “You’ve always thought yourself a fixer, but there comes a time to accept that some things are better left as festering wounds.” 

“You lost me there. Are you still talking about the war, or yourself?” Nelliel looks him up and down scathingly, her chin poised high. “I feel like for the first time, I have your life in my hands, rather than the other way around. I’m going to do what I think is right, and I will graciously accept a visit from you when I accomplish it.”

When she ambles away without another word, limping on one foot, Szayel releases a withering breath.

“She makes me wish I’d been smothered in my cot as an infant,” he hisses.

“Ulquiorra!”

They turn to see Shunsui slumped so heavily over his lieutenant that one could hardly tell she was there at all. He waves Ulquiorra over weakly, and they leave Szayel’s side to meet him halfway.

The lieutenant addresses Ulquiorra, “He shouldn’t be moving right now, even after resting for a while. But he sensed you here and wanted to speak to you. Why you’re here at all —“

“Not now, Nanao-chan,” Shunsui mumbles. It may be an attempt at humour, but the dreary tone betrays him. 

“You’ve made many questionable decisions that you’re going to have to be held accountable for,” she says before ducking from underneath his thick arm, steadying him against a charred wooden pillar, and giving him a moment of privacy.

Shunsui looks up at Ulquiorra. He has only one eye now. His eyepatch is skewed, the bands crossed incorrectly in his stringy, sweaty hair. It would be so easy for Ulquiorra to reach in and strangle him by the brain stem.

He grins. It looks more like a dying man’s grimace. “A few pieces missing, but you still recognize me, don’t you?”

Certainly. Ulquiorra wishes they could say the same about themself.

“Have you considered what you’re going to do after we’ve rebuilt?”

_We?_ Is he inviting Ulquiorra to set the foundation stones of Gotei barracks with their own two hands? Is he inviting them to stay in Seireitei? Will he not finish vanquishing all his enemies and put his zanpakutō between their ribs? 

Ulquiorra answers, “You’re not such a revolutionary to be able to change the universe’s nature.”

This was not where arrancar belonged. The sun was a curse — the leaves of spring were delayed by the very presence of such all-consuming evil, the children of this district left afflicted and brittle from the monsters that lurked the night. The ordained history, present, and modernity of the world was to always sit between the balance of Shinigami and arrancar. There were lines that were not meant to be crossed, feet not supposed to wade in other dimensions for longer than it took to consume a ravenous meal.

What would Ulquiorra do here? Would they continue to fight the next mutual evil that approached? Would they sit by and watch weeds grow? Would they spend all the days they’ve left being useful to Seireitei with Szayel?

Would they want to return to Hueco Mundo, even given the chance?

How can their soul be properly judged to Soul Society or Hell, if the executioner is inclined to one or the other?

Shunsui shakes his head. “The universe has been handling you being here just fine so far.”

Not what Ulquiorra meant. How romantic of him.

“Faced with your natural enemy,” they say, “You choose to lay down your sword. How many human souls will you sacrifice to rebalance your decision? Which ones?” 

“I don’t change rules. You’ve seen this: I just find ways to bend them enough without breaking anything.” He adjusts his elbow on the support, groaning as his other, bloodied hand gropes his knee. Before long he’ll need a cane like his revered mentor. “We’ve lost many things lately. There should be at least some of us who stand to gain. 

“And anyways,“ Shunsui hums thoughtfully. “You have one thousand four hundred and ninety-nine years left to go. I can tell you that Szayel Aporro wants to stay.” 

Ulquiorra doesn’t have anything to say to that. Not very many of Ulquiorra’s decisions used to hinge on what Szayel wanted.

Shunsui’s lieutenant must decide that the conversation sufficed when she flutters back to his side with another Shingiami wearing a long smock and face mask.

“Don’t give up on good things, Ulquiorra,” is all Shunsui gets in before he’s limped away.

Szayel sidles up behind them, arms crossed and unimpressed. “You know we won’t be kept around for long if we refuse.”

_So what?_ Ulquiorra’s silence prompts.

“I won’t stand to be made obsolete. Whatever you do at the end of this is your prerogative. Roll over and yield to the executioner if you so desire. Live out the rest of your sentence in chains underneath everyone’s feet, if it means being close to Aizen. I have no morals or loyalty to abandon. But I’m not above playing along with the hand that feeds me. I deserve life.”

_Cockroach_ , Ulquiorra thinks.

But the sun begins to set on the first new day of Soul Society, and everyone retreats to whatever shelter has been created out of the debris.

Szayel finds a space beneath a window deeper inside a slanted bell tower, a quaint corner that he promptly folds himself into, sinking low enough to be comfortable and to plant his feet against a supporting beam. 

Ulquiorra lingers near him for a few seconds. Then they sit beside him and wait for the sun to rise.

Seireitei weeps through the night. It stirs with people ambling through the new alleys and streets, digging up arms and torsos, weeping when they find distinguishing marks on those they recognize. Some look for their own fingers. People rise out of the rubble alive, sometimes. 

Ulquiorra watches from the tower until the sun reflects off the fluttering of a pink haori. Szayel and them meet Shunsui in the partially destroyed stairwell.

Shunsui’s reiatsu is brooding and his shoulders slanted heavily downwards. “The situation has changed,” he says. “Please come with me.”

Szayel lurches forward first.

“No,” Shunsui raises a hand. “Just Ulquiorra.”

“How perplexing,” Szayel furrows his eyebrows, but stays put. His fingers twitch to brush against Ulquiorra’s side as they walk past to follow Shunsui.

“I guess you’re not going to ask what’s happening and just wait until you eventually find out,” Shunsui says without looking at Ulquiorra, when they’re both alone.

No. Why would they? He’s already pointed out the logic in it. It’s puzzling that he still chose to comment on it at all.

Shunsui leads them in silence to a long, rickety building. The thin boards that built up the walls are patchy, one door in missing, and the roof is letting the sun in. The occupants are just as ramshackle. 

The Gotei 13. 

Or, notably, whatever is left. Whichever are still able to stand. 

Ulquiorra senses they are walking into their tomb, but they do not falter. The Captains arrange themselves into lines on either side of them. Shunsui takes the front.

“We’ve spent the night tirelessly discussing what our first orders of business should be,” Shunsui begins. His throat looks painfully tight, but he regards Ulquiorra with the impassive regard of a new god. Does he feel it too? “Now that the Quincy threat has been eliminated, some have been understandably concerned with those we previously considered enemies being harboured in our home.”

“That’s putting it lightly,” Suì-Fēng snaps. “It takes much longer than a year or two to forget our last near-annihilation.” 

Shunsui merely, graciously, dips his head. “While some arrancar have proven themselves to be dutiful allies in combat, there is a shared opinion that you, Ulquiorra Cifer, have been shown too much charity considering the damage you have dealt. We cannot look past the fact that you were amongst the closest to Sōsuke Aizen. It troubles us to think that you may still be loyal to his cause, despite your cooperation.

Do you have any defence?”

Only their fists, if they were to be raised at all.

Ulquiorra holds Shunsui’s gaze.

He grimaces. “Then it is my duty as Captain-Commander of the Gotei 13 to return you to Suiren, where you will carry out your remaining sentence for your crimes, perpetrated and anticipated, against Soul Society.”

Was it more painless than he expected it to be?

Shunsui and a trailing armed squad escorts Ulquiorra back through the shambles of Seireitei. Not many break busywork to look at them.

There is a tension that they aren’t keen on breaking: why did they stay silent. 

Because nothing levelled against them was truly incorrect.

 When the cell door slides open and Ulquiorra steps inside, they ask Shunsui, “Szayelaporro?”

 “He’s permitted to return to Hueco Mundo. I suspect he will happily do so.”

They nod.

Shunsui does not hesitate by the door. Perhaps it’s what he’s wanted all along. His experiment ended without other incident, didn’t it?

“Goodbye, Ulquiorra,” he says, and closes it.

The room is blue and empty, even with Ulquiorra in it.

They put their head to the wall, close their eyes, and sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thanks for reading.


End file.
